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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 



BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL 
Published bt CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



THE LAST FRONTIER : The White 
Man's Wab fob Civilization in Africa. 
Illustrated. 8vo net $1.50 

GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 

8vo net $1.50 

THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 

8vo net $3.00 



THE 

END OF THE TRAIL 

THE FAR WEST FROM 
NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA 



E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S. 

AUTHOR OF "the LAST FRONTIER," "GENTLEMEN ROVERS," ETC., ETC. 



WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS 
AND A MAP 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1914 






Copyright, 1914, bv 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published November, 1914 




NOV 21 1914 






TO 

MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-ADVENTURER 

ALBERT C. KUHN 

OF 
RANCHO VERBA BUENA 

IN "the valley of heart's delight" 



FOREWORD 

In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking 
the birthplace of the race upon the Caspian shore, 
poured through the passes of the Caucasus and peopled 
Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring 
Europeans crossed the western ocean and estabUshed 
a fringe of settlements along this continent's eastern 
rim. The American pioneers, taking up the historic 
march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from 
the Hudson to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Missis- 
sippi, from the Mississippi across the plains, across the 
Rockies, until athwart the Hne of their advance they 
found another ocean. They could go no farther, for 
beyond that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of 
the yellow race. The white man had completed his 
age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his 
march was finished; in the golden lands which look 
upon the Pacific he had come to the End of the Trail. 

In the great march which substituted the wheat- 
field for the desert, the orchard for the forest, the 
work was done by the hardiest breed of adventurers 
that ever foreran the columns of civilisation — the 
Pioneers. And the pioneer has always lived on the 
frontier. Most people believe that there is no longer 
any quarter of this continent that can properly be 

vii 



FOREWORD 

called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct 
as the buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have 
written this book. Though the gambler and the gun- 
fighter have vanished before the storm of public dis- 
approval; though the bison no longer roams the ranges; 
though the express rider has given way to the express- 
train; in the hinterland of that vast region which 
sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to 
the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona, 
Cahfornia, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, 
frontier conditions still endure and the frontiersman is 
still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited 
portions of this, "the Last West," white- topped prai- 
rie schooners — ^fuU sisters of those which crossed the 
plains in '49 — creak into the wilderness in the wake of 
the home seeker; the settler chops his Uttle farmstead 
from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from 
the trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack- 
trains wend their way into the northern wild; six- 
horse Concord coaches tear along the roads amid 
rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying 
drunkenly upon their leathern springs; out in the back 
country, where the roads run out and the trails begin, 
the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his picturesque 
panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps 
and vivid shirt. But this is the last call. It is the 
last chance to see a nation in the primeval stage of 
its existence. In a few more years, a very few, there 
will be no place on this continent, or on any continent, 
that can truthfully be called the frontier, and with it 

viii 



FOREWORD 

will disappear, never to return, those stern and hardy 
figures — the pioneer, the prospector, the packer, the 
puncher — ^who won for us the West. 

The real West — and by the term I do not mean 
that sun-kissed, flower-carpeted coast zone, with its 
orange groves and apple orchards, its palatial man- 
sions and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts and 
teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from 
San Diego to Vancouver and which to the Eastern 
visitor represents "the West" — cannot be seen from 
the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation 
platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished 
to visit those portions of the West which cannot be 
viewed from a car- window and because I wished to ac- 
quaint myself with the characteristics and problems 
and ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled 
from Mexico to the borders of Alaska by motor-car — 
the only time, I beUeve, that a car has made that 
journey on its own wheels and under its own power. 
Because that journey was so crowded with incident 
and obstacle and adventure, and because the incidents 
and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so 
graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in 
"the Last West," is my excuse for having to a certain 
extent made a personal narrative of the following 
chapters. 

Without entering into a tedious recital of dis- 
tances and road conditions, I have outlined certain 
routes which the motorist who contemplates turning 
the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit 

ix 



FOREWORD 

and pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide- 
book's place, I have deemed it as important to describe 
that enchanted littoral which has become the nation's 
winter playground as to depict that back country 
which the tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no 
brief for boards of trade and kindred organisations, I 
have incorporated the more significant facts and figures 
as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources 
which every prospective home-seeker wishes to know. 
But, more than anything else, I have tried to convey 
something of the spell of that big, open, unfenced, keep- 
on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and 
of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination 
which animates the kindly, hospitable, big-hearted, 
broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell there. 
They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day 
Pioneers. To them, across the miles, I lift my glass. 

E. Alexander Powell. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Conquerors of Sun and Sand i 

II. The Skylanders 33 

III. Chopping a Path to To-Morrow 61 

IV. The Land of Dreams-Come-True 95 

V. Where Gold Grows on Trees 123 

VI. The Coast of Fairyland 155 

VII, The Valley of Heart's Delight 187 

VIII. The Modern Argonauts 211 

IX. The Inland Empire . 237 

X. " Where .;RoLLS the Oregon" 271 

XI. A Frontier Arcady 305 

XII. Breaking the Wilderness 329 

XIII. Clinching the Rivets of Empire 351 

XIV. Back of Beyond 387 

XV. The Map that is Half Unrolled . . . . 419 

Index 455 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Promised Land Frontispiece ^ 

FACING PAGE 

A Desert Dawn in New Mexico \ s/ 

Santa Fe: the Most Picturesque City between the Oceans . i8 1/ 

Remains of an Ancient Civilisation 245/ 

The Land of the Turquoise Sky 38 i 

Acoma: Supposed Ancient Site and Present Site ... 40 '/ 

Acoma as It is To-Day 44 ^ 

Acoma Hunter Home from the Hunt . 48 '' 

Acoma Artisans 50 •' 

"Dance Mad!" 52^ 

Young Acomans 54 ' 

The Education of a Young Hopi $6'/ 

The Pyramid-Pueblo of Taos 58 

The Passing of the Puncher 64 is^" 

Where the Roads Run Out and the Trails Begin .... 72 u' 

The Trail of a Thousand Thrills 88 '^ 

Throwing the Diamond Hitch 90 i^- 

Scenes in the Motor Journey Through Arizona .... 98 

Not in Catalonia but in California 120 i^ 

xiii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PACING PAGE y 

A Modern Version of the Sermon on the Mount . . . . 130 '^ 

Santa Barbara, a City of Contrasts 168 *^ 

The Mission of Santa Barbara 170 '^ 

Lake Tahoe from the Slopes of the High Sierras . . . . 232 "^ 

The Yosemite — and a Lady Who Didn't Know Fear . . . 250/ 

Yosemite Youngsters, White and Red 252 1/ 

The Greatest Oil Fields in the World 260 "^ 

Over the Tehachapis 262 ^ 

The Overland Mail 274 v^ 

In the Oregon Hinterland 284 4/^ 

"Where Rolls the Oregon" 300 v^ 

Where Rods Bend Double and Reels Go Whir-r-r-r . . .324 ^r 

What the Road-Builders Have Done in Washington . . .332 y'" 

The Unexplored Olympics .......... 344 ^ 

Where the Salmon Come from 348*/' 

Outposts of Civilisation 354 j/' 

Breaking the Wilderness 3S6v^ 

Pack-Horses and a Pack-Dog 3S8»/^ 

In the Great, Still Land 362 v^' 

Sport on Vancouver Island 376 " 

Life at the Back of Beyond 380 v- 

Transport on America's Last Frontier 382 , 

Transport on America's Last Frontier 384 

Scenes on the Cariboo Trail 400 "^ 

Some Ladies from the Upper Skeena . . . ,. . .422" 

xiv 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Where No Motor-Car Had Ever Gone: Some Incidents of 

Mr. Powell's Journey Through the British Columbian ^ 

Wilderness 428 

Some Siwash Cemeteries 448 

Heraldry in the Hinterland 450 »^ 

A Land of Sublimity and Magnificence and Grandeur, of 

Gloom and Loneliness and Dread 452 >^ 

Map of the Far West, from New Mexico to British Columbia, 

Showing the Route Followed by the Author . at end of volume y 



'The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand; 
Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land. 
While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein 
The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain; 
And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race, 
Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place; 
And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood, 
Shall be homes for a nation's choosing, where no homes else had stood." 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

"TSN'T this invigorating?" said a passenger on the 
A Sunset Limited to a lounger on a station platform 
as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear air of New 
Mexico. 

"No, sir," replied the man, who happened to be a 
native filled with civic pride; "this is Deming." 

The story may be true, of course; but if it isn't it 
ought to be, for it is wholly typical of the attitude of 
the citizens of the youngest-but-one of our national 
family. Indeed, I had not spent twenty-four hours 
within the borders of the State before I had discovered 
that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its 
inhabitants are their pride and faith in the land wherein 
they dwell. And this despite the fact that their neigh- 
bours across the Hne in Arizona refer to New Mexico 
slightingly — though not without some truth — as a State 
"where they dig for water and plough for wood." 

Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in 
the United States, has changed so remarkably in the 
space of a single decade. Ten years ago the only things 
suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys, 

3 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Hopi snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eat- 
ing-houses. Five years ago Deming was as t)^ical a 
cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos. Gin- 
palaces and gambling-hells were running twenty-four 
hours a day; cattlemen in Angora chaps and high- 
crowned sombreros lounged under the shade of the 
wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine 
for cuspidors; wiry, imkempt cow-ponies stood in rows 
along the hitching rails which Hned a street ankle-deep 
in dust. Those were the careless days of "chaps and 
taps and latigo-straps," when writers of the Wild West 
school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as 
though made to their order, in every barroom, and 
groups of spurred and booted figures awaited the 
moving-picture man (who had not then come into his 
own) on every corner. 

All southern New Mexico was held by experts — 
at least they called themselves experts — to be a water- 
less and next-to-good-for-nothing waste. Government 
engineers had traversed the region and, without con- 
sidering it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, 
had written it down in their reports as being a worth- 
less desert; and the gentlemen who make the school 
geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting 
it a speckled yellow, Hke the Sahara and the Kalahari. 
Real-estate operators, racing westward to earn a few 
speculative millions in California, glanced from the 
windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of 
sun-swept sand and, with a regretful sigh that Provi- 
dence had been so careless as to forget the water, set- 

4 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

tied back to their magazines and their cigars. So the 
cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among 
the straggling scrub, to get such a Uving as they could 
from the sparse desert grasses, were left in undisturbed 
possession, and if their uniform success in finding water 
wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested 
any agricultural possibiHties they were careful to keep 
the thought to themselves. 

One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman, 
instead of leaning back regretfully, descended from the 
train, hired a horse, and rode out into the mesquite- 
dotted waste. He told the liveryman that he was a 
prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was. 
Being, incidentally, the manager of one of the largest 
and most profitable ranches in CaHfornia, he was as 
familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a cowboy 
is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he 
understood the science of irrigation from I to N. 
After a few days of quiet investigation he dropped 
into the commissioner's office in Deming one morning 
and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land. 
Most of those who heard about it said that he was 
merely a fool of a tenderfoot who was throwing away 
his time and money and who ought to have a guardian 
appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise 
old cattlemen looked worried. Within a fortnight he 
had erected his machinery and was drilHng for water. 
And wherever his wells went down, there water came 
up : fine, clear, sparkHng water — ^gallons and gallons of 
it. It soused the thirsty desert and turned its good- 

5 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

for-nothing sand into good-for-anything loam. The 
seeds which the far-seeing Calif ornian planted, 
sprouted, and the sprouts became blades, and the 
blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and corn and cane — 
and the future of all southern New Mexico was as- 
sured. 

The news of the discovery of water in the Mim- 
bres valley and of the miracles that had been per- 
formed through its agency spread over the country 
as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed 
men from half the States in the Union began to pile 
into Deming by every train, eager to take up the land 
while it was still to be had under the hospitable terms 
of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in 
1 910 that the CaUf ornian, John Hund, sunk his first 
well; when I was in the office of the United States 
commissioner in Deming four years later I found that 
the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from 
the city hmits. 

Should you ever have occasion to fly over New 
Mexico in an aeroplane you will have no difficulty 
whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley; viewed 
from the sky it looks exactly Hke a bright-green rug 
spread across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most 
of the valley holdings were, I noticed, of but ten or 
twenty acres, comparatively few of them being more 
than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found 
that his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates 
ten acres thoroughly rather than a hundred super- 
ficially. This lesson they have had hammered into 

6 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

them not alone from experience but from observing 
the operations of a couple of almond-eyed brethren 
named Wah, hailing originally, I beHeve, from Canton, 
who own a twenty- three-acre truck-farm near Deming. 
Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those 
farmsteads clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria, 
where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is 
tended with pathetic care, seem but crude and ama- 
teurish efforts in agriculture when compared with the ef- 
forts to which these Chinese brothers have carried their 
intensive farming. Though watered only by a small 
and primitive well, their farm graphically illustrates 
what can be accomplished by paying attention to those 
little things which the American farmer is accustomed 
contemptuously to disregard, as well as being an object- 
lesson in the remarkable variety of fruits and vege- 
tables which the valley is capable of producing. These 
Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three 
crops of vegetables a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted. 
They even begrudge the narrow strips which are 
used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the 
banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and 
tomatoes are grown between melon rows. A drove of 
corpulent porkers attend voraciously to the garden 
refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness 
doubled by being stocked with fish. Were the New 
Mexicans notoriously not lotus-eaters, the Brothers 
Wah would doubtless find still another use for their 
reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It 
is paying attention to such relatively insignificant 

7 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

details as these which makes J. Chinaman, Esquire, 
the best gardener in the world. It pays, too, for they 
told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty- 
three-acre holding, are increasing their bank-account 
at the rate of eight thousand dollars a year. After 
noting the cordiahty with which they were greeted by 
the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I 
should hke to have a bank president greet me the way 
he did them. 

I have seen many remarkable farming countries 
— in Rhodesia, for example, and the hinterland of 
Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces of 
Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Im- 
perial valleys of California — ^but I can recall none 
where soil and cUmate seemed to have combined so 
effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the 
Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do 
your farming in a region where you will never have 
to worry about how long it will be before it rains, nor 
to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual 
rainfall in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed 
eight inches, there is a generous margin left for sun- 
shine. Instead of praying for rain, and then cursing 
his luck because it doesn't come, or because it comes 
too heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his 
artesian well and throws over an electric switch which 
sets the pump agoing. When his fields are sufficiently 
irrigated he throws the switch back again. From 
the view-point of health it would be hard to improve 
upon the cHmate of the Mimbres valley, or, for that 

8 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

matter, of any other portion of New Mexico, its eleva- 
tion of four thousand three hundred feet, taken with 
the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and 
Japan and southernmost CahfoiTiia, giving it summers 
which are hot without being humid or oppressive and 
winters which are never uncomfortably cold. 

Like their neighbours in other parts of the South- 
west, the farmers of southern New Mexico have gone 
daft over alfalfa. To me — I might as well admit it 
frankly — one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like an- 
other, and they all look extremely uninteresting, but 
I suppose that if they were netting me from fifty to 
seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they are their 
owners, I would take a more lively interest in them. 
I never arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hun- 
gry, and tired, but that there was a group of eager 
boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me 
at the station. 

"Jump right in," they would say. "We have an 
alfalfa field over here that we want to show you. It's 
only about thirty miles across the desert and we'll 
get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed." 

They're as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa 
in New Mexico as the Esquimaux of Labrador are 
about a stranded whale. 

If you have an idea that you would like to be a 
hardy frontiersman and wear a broad-brimmed hat 
and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in that 
region which Hes between the Gila and the Pecos, it 
were well to disabuse yourself of several erroneous 

9 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

impressions which seem to prevail about life in the 
Southwest. In the first place, you can dress just as 
much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted 
in the magazines as you wish — ^fleecy chaparejos and 
a horsehair hat band and a pair of spurs that jingle 
like an approaching four-in-hand when the wearer 
walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia — for they 
are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have 
become accustomed to all sorts of queer doings by new- 
comers. In many respects they are the politest people 
that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a 
cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer 
must not imagine that he can gallop madly across the 
ranges, at least in the vicinity of the towns, for he is 
more Ukely than not to be hauled up before a justice 
of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one's 
alfalfa field or cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though 
painfully prosaic, are about the most profitable crop 
you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as 
three hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the 
intending rancher must make up his mind that he 
must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no place 
for the agriculturist de luxe who expects to sit on the 
piazza of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do 
the work. No, sirree ! It is a roU-up-your-sleeves-spit- 
on-your-hands-and-pitch-in land where every one works 
and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do, 
goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and 
first of all it has to be cleared of the pinon and mes- 
quite and chaparral which cover it. This clearing and 

lO 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about 
five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire- wood 
in return — and there's nothing that makes a cheerier 
blaze on a winter's night than a hearth heaped with 
the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop 
down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it 
up with a hoe. Then there is the matter of well 
digging, which, including the cost of boring, machinery, 
and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five 
dollars an acre. Since the construction of several 
large power-plants, the cost of pumping has been 
greatly reduced by the use of electricity. It is quite 
possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to se- 
cure tracts close to town with all the preliminary work 
done for him, water being provided from a central 
pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the capi- 
talised cost added to the price of his land, which may 
be purchased, like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the 
instalment plan. That will be about all, I think, for 
facts and figures. 

One of the most interesting things about the set- 
tlers with whom I talked in southern New Mexico is 
that, so far as any previous knowledge of agriculture 
was concerned, most of them were the veriest ama- 
teurs. One man whom I met had taught school in 
Iowa for a quarter of a century, but along in middle 
life he decided that there was more money to be made 
in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there 
was in teaching the same thing to the young idea. 
Another was a Methodist clergyman from Kentucky 

II 



THE END OF THE TRAIL ' 

who told me that he had never had a real conception 
of the hell-fire he preached about until he started in 
one scorching July morning to sink an artesian well in 
the desert. Still a third successful settler had been a 
physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number of 
"long-horned Texicans," as the Texan cattlemen are 
called, who have moved over into New Mexico and 
become farmers. Scattered through the country are 
a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar- 
loafing, remittance-man type so common in Canada 
and Austraha, but energetic, hard-working youngsters 
who are earnestly engaged in building homes for 
themselves in a new country and under an adopted 
flag. Not all of the Enghshmen who have come out to 
New Mexico have proven so steady or successful, 
however, for a few years ago an English syndicate 
purchased a Spanish land grant of some two million 
acres in the vicinity of Raton and sent out a complete 
equipment of British managers, superintendents, fore- 
men, butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gar- 
deners, coachmen, and other fimctionaries, not to men- 
tion coaches, tandem carts, a pack of foxhounds, and 
other paraphernalia of the sporting fife. A man who 
witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it 
was more fun than watching the unloading of the 
Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great life those 
Englishmen led while it lasted — tea at four every 
afternoon, evening clothes for dinner, and then a few 
rubbers of bridge — ^but it ended in the property being 
taken over at forced sale by a group of hard-headed 

12 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs, 
used the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds 
to churning butter, and are making the big place pay 
dividends regularly. 

Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the 
mail-train goes is Albuquerque, the metropolis of the 
State — ^if the term metropoHs can properly be applied 
to a place with not much over twelve thousand inhabi- 
tants — set squarely in the centre of the one hundred 
and twenty- two thousand square mile parallelogram 
which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is a railway cen- 
tre of considerable importance, for from there one can 
get through cars north to Denver and Pike's Peak, south 
to the borders of Mexico and its revolutions, and west 
to the Golden Gate. One of the things that struck me 
most forcibly about Albuquerque — and the observa- 
tion is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico 
— ^is that instead of having weather they enjoy cli- 
mate. It is pretty hard to beat a land where the 
moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but 
never in your bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Al- 
buquerque's most valuable asset, and she trades on 
it for all she is worth — and it is worth to her several 
milUon dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities 
that I know of where they want and welcome invaHds 
and say so frankly. They could not do otherwise with 
any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens 
of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging 
desperately to Hfe, and were lifted out of the car 
window on a stretcher. These one-time invalids are 

13 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you 
will find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been 
much too busy catering to the wants of the thousands 
of tourists and invalids who step onto its station plat- 
form each year to pay much attention to agricultural 
development; but bordering on the town are several 
thousand acres of as fine, healthy desert as you will 
find anywhere outside of the Sahara. They are en- 
closed, as though by a great garden wall, by the Man- 
zano ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me 
across the billiard-table surface of the desert in his 
motor-car told me that the government now has an 
irrigation project under consideration which, by dam- 
ming the waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim up- 
ward of four hundred thousand acres of this arid land. 
And the great government irrigation projects now in 
operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown 
that water can produce as many things from a desert 
as the late Monsieur Hermann could from a gentle- 
man's hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country 
around Albuquerque, from the city limits to the dis- 
tant foot-hills, will be as green with alfalfa as Ireland 
is with shamrock. 

They have a commercial club in Albuquerque 
that is a club. At first I thought I had wandered into 
a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious lobby, its 
busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture, 
and the mahogany desk with the sohcitous clerk be- 
hind it, it is about as distantly related to the usual 
commercial club as one could well imagine. It gives 

14 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

those men in the community who are doing things, 
and the others who want to be doing things or ought 
to be doing things, a place where they can meet and 
discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, 
the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irriga- 
tion, crops, fishing, house building, automobiles, and 
the climate. I would suggest to the club's board of 
governors, however, that it take steps to remove the 
undertaker's establishment which flanks the entrance. 
When one drops into a place to get some facts regard- 
ing the desirability of settling there, it is not exactly 
reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins. 

Whoever was responsible for the architecture of 
the University of New Mexico buildings, which stand 
in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves a metaphori- 
cal slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young 
State and not yet overly rich in this world's goods, so 
that if, with their limited resources, they had attempted 
to erect collegiate buildings along the usual hackneyed 
Hues, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all 
that sort of thing, the result would probably have 
looked more like a third-rate normal school than like 
a State university. But they did nothing of the sort. 
Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the an- 
cient communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of 
the native adobe, which is durable, inexpensive, warm 
in winter and in summer cool. All the decorations, 
inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures 
painted in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus, 
at a moderate cost, they have a group of buildings 

IS 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

which typify the history of New Mexico and are in 
harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape; 
which are admirably suited to the climate; and which 
are unique among collegiate institutions in that they 
are modelled after those great houses in which the 
Hopi lived and worked before the dawn of history on 
the American continent. 

Santa Fe, the capital of the State, is, to my way 
of thinking, the quaintest and most fascinating city 
between the oceans. Very old, very sleepy, very pic- 
turesque, it presents more neglected opportunities 
than any place I know. I should like to have a chance 
to stage-manage Santa Fe, for the scenery, which 
ranks among the best efforts of the Great Scene Painter, 
is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the 
wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it de- 
serves and the curtain could be rung up to a capacity 
house. Where else within our borders is there a three- 
hundred-year-old palace whose red-tiled roof has shel- 
tered nearly five-score governors — Spanish, Pueblo, 
Mexican, and American? (In a back room of the 
palace, as you doubtless know. General Lew Wallace, 
while governor of New Mexico, wrote "Ben Hur.") 
Where else are Indians in scarlet blankets and beaded 
moccasins, their braided hair hanging in front of their 
shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets 
as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else 
can you see groups of cow-punchers on sweating, danc- 
ing ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in high-crowned 
hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with 

i6 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

their patient pack-mules plodding along behind them, 
and diminutive burros trotting to market under bur- 
dens so enormous that nothing can be seen of the 
burro but his ears and tail? 

Though at present it is only a sleepy and forgot- 
ten backwater, with the main arteries of commerce 
running along their steel channels a score of miles 
away, Santa Fe could be made, at a small expenditure 
of anything save energy and taste, one of the great 
tourist Meccas of America To begin with, it is the 
only place still left in the United States where Buffalo 
Bill's Wild West could merge into the landscape with- 
out causing a stampede. Those who know how much 
pains and money were spent by the municipality of 
Brussels in restoring a single square of that city to its 
original mediaeval picturesqueness, whole blocks of 
brick and stone having to be torn down to produce the 
desired effect, will appreciate the possibiHties of Santa 
Fe, where the necessary restorations have only to 
be made in inexpensive adobe. Desultory efforts are 
being made, it is true, to induce the residents to pro- 
mote this scheme for a harmonious ensemble by re- 
stricting their architecture to those quaint and simple 
designs so characteristic of the country, the Board of 
Trade providing an object-lesson in the possibiHties of 
the humble adobe by erecting a charming Httle two- 
room cottage, with an open fireplace, a veranda, and 
a pergola, at a total expense of one hundred dollars, 
but every now and then the sought-for architectural 
harmony is given a rude jolt by some one who could 

17 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

not resist the attractions of Queen Anne gables or 
Clydesdale piazza columns or Colonial red-brick-and- 
green-blinds. 

Set at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range, a 
mile above the level of the sea, with one of the kindli- 
est all-the-year-round cUmates in the world, and with 
an atmosphere which is far more Oriental than Ameri- 
can, Santa Fe has the making of just such another 
"show town" as Biskra, in southern Algeria, where 
Hichens laid the scene of "The Garden of Allah." If 
its citizens would wake up to its possibilities sufficiently 
to advertise it as scores of Californian towns with not 
half of its attractions are advertised; if they would 
restore the more historically important of the crum- 
bling adobe buildings to their original condition and 
erect their new buildings in the same characteristic 
and inexpensive style; if they would keep the streets 
alive with the colourful figures of blanketed Indians and 
Mexican venders of silver filigree; and if the local 
hotel would have the originality to meet the incoming 
trains with a four-horse Concord coach, such as is in- 
separably associated with the Santa ¥6 Trail, instead 
of a ramshackle bus, they would soon have so many 
visitors pihng into the New Mexican capital that they 
could not take care of them. But they are a dolce far 
niente folk, are the people of Santa Fe, and I expect 
that they will placidly continue along the same happy, 
easy, sleepy path that they have always followed. 
And perhaps it is just as well that they should. 

"They call me Santa Fe for short," the New 
i8 




m 



A dwelling. 





From a photograph copyright by Jess Xusbaur, 

Interior of a room. 
SANTA FE: THE MOST PICTURESQUE CITY BETWEEN THE OCEANS. 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

Mexican capital might answer if one inquired its name, 
"but my whole name is La Ciudad Real de la Santa 
Fe de San Francisco," which, translated into our own 
tongue, means "The Royal Gity of the Holy Faith of 
Saint Francis." It is some name — there is no denying 
that — ^but historically the town is quite able to Hve 
up to it. Fifteen years before the anchor of the May- 
flower rumbled down off New England's rocky coast, 
Juan de Onate, an adventurous and gold-himgry gen- 
tleman of Spain, marching up from Mexico, had raised 
over the Indian pueblo which had occupied this site 
from time beyond reckoning the banner of Castile. 
In 1680 came the great Indian revolt; the Spanish 
soldiers and settlers were surprised and massacred 
and the brown-robed friars were slain on the altars of 
the churches they had built. For twelve years the 
Pueblos ruled the land. Then came De Vargas, at 
the head of a column of steel-capped and cuirassed 
soldiery and, after a ferocious reckoning with the 
Indians, retook the city in the name of his Most 
CathoUc Majesty of Spain. With the overthrow of 
Spanish dominion in Mexico, the City of the Holy 
Faith became the northernmost outpost of the Mexican 
RepubHc, and Mexican it remained until that August 
morning in 1846 when General Kearney and his brass- 
helmeted dragoons clattered into its plaza and raised 
on the palace flagstaff a flag that was never to come 
down. That episode is commemorated by a marble 
shaft which rises amid the cottonwoods on the his- 
toric plaza. On its base are carved the words in which 

19 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

General Kearney proclaimed the annexation of New 
Mexico to the United States: 

"We come as friends to make you a part of the repre- 
sentative government. In our government all men are 
equal. Every man has a right to serve God according 
to his conscience and his heart.'' 

At the other end of the plaza another monument 
marks the end of the famous Santa Fe Trail, over 
which, in prairie-schooners and Concord coaches and 
on the backs of mules and horses, was borne the com- 
merce of the prairies. Santa Fe was to the historic trail 
of which it was the end what Bagdad is to the cara- 
van routes across the Persian desert. No sooner would 
the lead team of one of these mile-long wagon-trains 
top the surroimding hills than word of its approach 
would spread through Santa Fe like wildfire. "Los 
Americanos! Los Garros! La Garavana!" the inhabi- 
tants would call to one another as they turned their 
faces plazaward, for the coming of a wagon-train was 
as much of an event as is the arrival of a steamer at a 
South Sea island. By the time that the first of the 
creaking, white-topped wagons, with its five yoke of 
oxen, had come to a halt before the custom-house, 
every inhabitant of the town was in the streets. A 
necessary preliminary to any trading was for the 
chief trader to make a call of ceremony upon the 
Spanish governor and, after a laboured interchange of 
salutes and compliments, to pay him the enormous 
toll of five hundred dollars per wagon imposed by the 
Spanish government upon wagon-trains coming from 

20 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

the United States. It came out of the pockets of the 
Spaniards in the end, however, for the American 
traders simply added it to the prices which they 
charged for their merchandise, which were high enough 
aheady, goodness knows: Hnen brought four dollars a 
yard, broadcloth twenty-five dollars a yard, and every- 
thing else in proportion. It is no wonder that the 
traders of the plains often retired as wealthy men. 
Stephen B. Elkins came to New Mexico, where he was 
to found his fortune, as bull- whacker in a wagon- train; 
one of the traders. Bent by name, came in time to sit 
himself in the governor's palace in Santa Fe; and 
Kit Carson's earlier years were spent in guiding these 
commercial expeditions. With the driving of the last 
spike in the Union Pacific Railroad, however, the im- 
portance of Santa Fe as a half-way house on the over- 
land route to California vanished, and since then it 
has dwelt, contentedly enough, in its glorious climate 
and its memories of the past. 

Up the Caiion of the Santa Fe, over the nine- 
thousand-foot Dalton Divide, and down into the 
Canon of the Macho, several hundred gentlemen, in 
garments of a somewhat conspicuous pattern provided 
by the State, are building what will in time take rank 
as one of the world's great highways. It is to be called 
the Scenic Highway, and when it is completed it will 
form a section of the projected Camino Real from 
Denver to El Paso. It promises to be to the American 
Southwest what the Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to south- 
em Italy and the famous Corniche Road is to the 

21 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

south of France. By means of switchbacks — twenty- 
two of them in all — it will wind up the precipitous 
slopes of the great Dalton Divide, twist and turn 
among the snowcapped titans of the Sangre de Cristo 
Range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy 
chasms, drop down through the leafy soKtudes of the 
Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch its length 
across the rolling uplands toward Taos, the pyramid- 
city of the Pueblos. 

Within a hundred-mile radius of Santa Fe are 
three of the most wonderful "sights" in this or any 
other country: the hill-city of Acoma, the pyramid- 
pueblo of Taos (both of which are described at length 
in the succeeding chapter) and the Pajarito National 
Park. The Pajarito (in Spanish, remember, the j 
takes the sound of h) provides what is unquestionably 
the richest field of archaeological research in the United 
States, the remains of the inconceivably ancient civi- 
lisation with which it is Uterally strewn, bearing much 
the same relation to the history of the New World that 
the ruins of Upper Egypt do to that of the Old. To 
reach the Pajarito, where the ruins of the cave peo- 
ple exist, you can ride or drive or motor. As the dis- 
tance from Santa Fe is only about forty miles, if you 
are willing to get up with the chickens you can make 
it in a single day. Comfortable sleeping quarters and 
excellent meals can be had at the hospitable ranch- 
house of Judge Abbott, or, if you prefer, you can take 
along a pair of blankets and some provisions and 
sleep high and dry in a cave once occupied by one of 

22 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

your very remote ancestors. The very courteous gen- 
tlemen in charge of the American School of Archaeology 
at Santa Fe are always glad to furnish information 
regarding the best way to enter the Pajarito. Twenty 
odd miles north of Santa Fe and, debouching quite 
unexpectedly upon the flat summit of a mesa, you 
look down upon the iridescent ribbon which is the 
Rio Grande as it twists and turns between the sheer, 
smooth walls of chalky rock which form the sides of 
White Rock Canon. Coming into this great gorge at 
right angles are the smaller canons — chief among them 
the one known as the Rito de los Frijoles — in whose 
precipitous walls the cave folk hewed their homes. 
Some of these smaller canons are hundreds of feet 
above the bed of the Rio Grande, with openings barely 
wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through 
into the river below. 

You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an 
immensely long and narrow canon — so narrow that 
Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone across — 
with walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as 
those of the Flatiron Building. Then you must pic- 
ture the lower face of this rocky wall as being Hterally 
honeycombed by thousands — and when I say thou- 
sands I do not mean hundreds — of windows and doors 
and port-holes and apertures and other openings to 
caves hollowed from the soft rock of the chffs. It is a 
city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum, mysterious as 
the lines of the hand, older than recorded history. 
This once populous city consisted of a single street, 

23 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

twelve miles long, its cave-dwellings, which were reached 
by ladders or by steps cut in the soft tufa, rising above 
each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan apart- 
ment building. Such portions of the face of the cliff 
as are not perforated with doors and windows are em- 
beUished with pictographs, many of them in an ex- 
traordinary state of preservation, which, if the sight- 
seeing public only knew it, are as interesting and far 
more perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs 
of the Kings at Thebes. On the floor of the valley 
the archaeologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular 
community house which, when viewed from above, 
bears a striking resemblance to the ancient Greek 
theatre at Taormina, while on the Puye to the north 
a communal building of twelve hundred rooms — 
larger than the Waldorf-Astoria — ^has been excavated. 
Farther down the Rito is the stone circle or dancing 
floor to which the prehistoric young folk descended to 
make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them 
from their houses in the cHff. (I doubt not that, 
when the sun began to sink behind the Jemez, some 
skin-clad mother would lean from the window of her 
fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, en- 
grossed in learning the steps of the prehistoric equiva- 
lent of the tango on the dancing floor below: "A-ya, 
come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw's 
just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it 
cooked for supper.") Three miles up the canon, half 
a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is the arched 
ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this 
strange people performed their still stranger rites. 

24 




" The arched ceremonial cave where . . . this strange people performed their still 
stranger rites." 




"The archaeologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community house.'' 
REMAINS OF AN ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

Thanks to the energy of the American Archaeological 
Society, this cave has been restored to the same con- 
dition in which it was when prehistoric lodge members 
worked their mysterious degrees and made the quak- 
ing initiates ride the goat. Though it is the aim of 
the society to year by year restore portions of the Rito 
until the whole canon has returned to its original con- 
dition, such difficulty has been experienced in ob- 
taining the necessary funds that at the present rate of 
progress it will take a century to effect a complete 
restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth 
like water to promote the excavation and restoration of 
the ruins of alien peoples in other lands. Though car- 
loads of pottery and utensils have been carted away 
to enrich museums and private collections, the surface 
of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, more than 
twenty thousand communal caves and dwellings remain- 
ing to tempt the seekers of lost cities. Where did the 
inhabitants of this strange city go — and why? What 
swept their civiHsation away? When did the age-old 
silence fall? These are questions which even the 
archaeologists do not attempt to answer. All that 
they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the 
caves which underlie the communal dwelHngs in the 
Pajarito yield ample evidence of having been occu- 
pied by human beings in the days of the lava flow, 
when the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land 
and the world was very, very young. 

Of the three great elemental industries of New 
Mexico — cattle raising, sheep raising, and mining — 

25 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

cattle raising was the first and, more than any other, 
gave colour to the country. The early Spanish and 
Mexican settlers were cow-men, and the old Sonora 
stock, "all horns and backbone," may still be seen on 
some of the interior ranges, though they are now al- 
most a thing of the past. Then came the great wagon- 
trains of Texans, California boimd, many of whom, 
attracted by the wealth of pasturage, stopped off and 
turned their long-horned cattle out on the grass-grown 
desert. As Texas and the Middle West became fenced 
and civilised, the old-time cattlemen drove their herds 
farther and farther toward the setting sun. In those 
days there were no sheep to compete for the pasture; 
mountains and desert were clothed with grass so rich 
and long that they looked as though they were uphol- 
stered in green velvet; there was not a strand of 
barbed wire between the Pecos and the Colorado. 
New Mexico was indeed the cow-man's paradise. 
Though the range has in many places been ruined by 
droughts and overstocking; though a woolly wave has 
encroached upon the lands which the cow-man had 
regarded as inaUenably his own, there are, neverthe- 
less, close to a million head of cattle within the borders 
of the State, by far the greater part of which are Here- 
fords and Durhams, for the imported stock has in- 
creased the cow-man's profits out of all proportion to 
the initial expense. 

Feeding with equal right and freedom upon the 
same public domain are upward of five million head of 
sheep, for New Mexico is the home of the wool indus- 

26 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

try in America. The early Spanish settlers kept large 
flocks of the straight-necked, coarse-wooled Mexican 
sheep in the country around Santa Fe, and from them 
the Navajos and Moquis, those industrious weavers of 
blankets and workers in silver, soon stole or bartered 
for enough to start a sheep business of their own, it 
being said that a third of all the sheep in the State are 
now owned by Indians. UnUke cattle, sheep, in cool 
weather, can exist without water for a month at a 
time; so, when the desert turns from yellow to green 
in the spring, they drift out over it in great flocks 
which look for all the world Hke fleecy clouds. Each 
flock, which usually consists of several thousand sheep, 
is attended by a herder and his "rustler," who cooks, 
packs in supplies, and brings water in casks from the 
nearest stream for the use of the herder and his dogs, 
the juicy browse providing all the moisture that the 
sheep require. 

Owing to its warm, dry weather, New Mexico is 
one of the earliest shearing stations in the world, the 
work beginning the latter part of January and lasting 
until the first of May. In this time enough wool is 
clipped to supply a considerable portion of the people 
of the United States with suits and blankets. Until 
quite recently the shearing of the wool was a long and 
tedious task, even the more expert hand shearers sel- 
dom being able to average more than sixty or seventy 
fleeces a day. When machine shearing was introduced 
into New Mexico a few years age, however, this daily 
average was promptly doubled. Sheep-shearers are 

27 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

probably the best-paid and hardest-working class of 
men in the world, receiving from seven to eight and a 
half cents a head and averaging one hundred and 
twenty-five sheep a day. The best of them, however, 
shear from two to three hundred sheep in a single day, 
the record, I believe, being three hundred and twenty- 
five. As the shearing season only lasts through six 
months of the year, during which time they must 
travel from Texas to Montana, the unionised shearers 
demand and receive high wages, some of them making 
as much as twenty dollars a day. Yet, in spite of this 
and of the grazing fee of six cents a head for all sheep 
that feed on forest reserves, it is safe to say that the 
wool-growers are the most prosperous men in New 
Mexico. 

The social fabric of New Mexico is a curious blend- 
ing of Mexicans, Indians, and Americans. Of these 
elements the Mexicans are by far the most numerous, 
their customs, costumes, and language lending a de- 
cidedly Spanish flavour to the country. Living for the 
most part in scattered settlements along the mountain 
streams or in their own quarters in the towns, they 
enjoy a lazy, irresponsible, and not uncomfortable ex- 
istence in return for their humble labour, not differing 
materially, either in their mode of life, manners, or 
morals, from their kinsmen below the Rio Grande. 
Shiftless, indolent, indifferently honest, the peons of 
New Mexico, like the South African Kaffirs and the 
Egyptian fellaheen, are nevertheless invaluable to the 

28 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

welfare of the State, for they perform practically all 
the labour on the ranches, mines, and railways. PoHti- 
cally they are an element to be reckoned with, about 
seventy-five per cent of the population of Santa Fe 
being Mexicans, while sixty per cent of the State 
Legislature is from the same race. As a result of this 
Latin preponderance in the population, practically all 
Americans in New Mexico are compelled to have at 
least a working knowledge of Spanish, which is really 
the lingua franca of the country, it being by no means 
unusual to find one who speaks it better than the Mexi- 
cans themselves. Owing to the great influx of settlers 
during the last few years, the Mexican proportion of 
the population has been greatly reduced, as is con- 
firmed by the increasing use of the English language 
and of English newspapers. 

One of the strangest reHgious sects in the world — 
the Penitentes — are recruited from the Mexican ele- 
ment of the population. Although this dread form of 
religious fanaticism has its centre in the region about 
San Mateo, it permeates peon Hfe in every quarter of 
the State. For the Penitente is not an Indian; he is 
a Mexican. The Indians of the Pueblos repudiate 
Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catho- 
lic, for the Church has fought his terrible rites tooth 
and nail, though thus far it has fought them in vain. 
He is really a grim survivor of those secret orders 
whose fanaticism and reHgious excesses became a by- 
word even in the calloused Europe of the Middle Ages. 
The sect is divided into two branches: the Brothers of 

29 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Light — La Luz — and the Brothers of Darkness — Las 
Tinieblas. Though they hold secret meetings with 
more or less regularity throughout the year in their 
lodges or morados, they are really active only during the 
forty days of Lent. During that period both men and 
women flog their naked backs with scourges of aloe 
fibre, wind their limbs with wire or rope so tightly as to 
stop the circulation, lie for hours at a time on beds of 
cactus, make pilgrimages to moimtain shrines with their 
unstockinged feet in shoes filled with jagged flints, 
stagger torturing miles across the sun-baked desert 
under the weight of enormous crosses, while on Good 
Friday this carnival of torture culminates in one of 
their number, chosen by lot, actually being crucified. 
It has been a number of years, however, since a Peni- 
tente has died on the cross, for, since the law came to 
New Mexico, they have found it wiser to fasten their 
willing victim to the cross with rope instead of nails. 
Though sporadic efforts have been made to break up 
the sect, they have thus far been imsuccessful, as it is 
no secret that many men high in the poHtical life of 
New Mexico bear on their backs the tattooed cross 
which is the symbol of the order. 

Though the growth of the white population has 
heretofore been slow, it has begun to increase by 
leaps and bounds with the development of irrigation. 
Though New Mexico now contains representatives 
from every State in the Union and from pretty much 
every country in the world, the average run of society 
exhibits a tendency toward high-crowned hats that 

30 



CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 

shows the dominating influence of Texas. They are, I 
think, the most hospitable folk that I have ever met; 
they are tolerant of other people's opinions; have a 
tendency to ride rather than walk; are ready to fight 
at the drop of the hat; hate to count their money; Ke 
only for the sake of entertainment; like a big proposi- 
tion; and know how to handle it — there you have them, 
the gentlemen of New Mexico. But don't go out to 
New Mexico, my Eastern friends, with the idea that 
you can butt into society with the aid of a good cigar 
— because you can't. They are a free-bom, free- 
living, free-speaking folk, are the dwellers out in the 
back country where the desert meets the mountains 
and the mountains meet the sky, and they don't give 
a whoop-and-hurrah whether you come or stay away. 

Such, in brief, bold outHne, is the New Mexico 
of to-day. I have tried to paint you a picture, as well 
as I know how, of the progress, potentialities, and pros- 
pects of this, the youngest but one of the sisterhood 
of States. Though New Mexico, as a Territory, was 
willing enough to be a synonym for Indian villages and 
snake-dances and cavorting cowboys, the State of New 
Mexico stands for something very different indeed. 
Though it welcomes the tourists who come-look-see- 
spend-go, it prefers the settlers who are prepared to 
stay and make it their home. UnHke its sister State of 
Arizona, New Mexico does not suffer from that greatest 
of privations — ^lack of water — for the mountain-flood 
waters that now go to waste would store great reser- 

31 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

voirs, there is the flow of numerous streams and river 
systems, and below the surface are artesian belts of 
water waiting only to be tapped by the farmer's well. 
That the soil, once watered, is very fertile is best 
proved by the orchards, gardens, and meadows which 
cover the valleys of the Mimbres and the Pecos. Ten 
years ago the cattlemen of New Mexico used to say 
that it took "sixty acres to raise a steer"; to-day, 
thanks to irrigation, a single acre of alfalfa does the 
business. In gold, silver, coal, and copper the State is 
very rich — the largest copper mine in the world is at 
Silver City — while its turquoise deposits surpass those 
of Persia. And the people are as big-hearted and 
broad-minded and open-handed as you will find any- 
where on earth. Taking it by and large, therefore, a 
man with some experience, a little capital, plenty of 
energy and ambition, and an intimate acquaintance 
with hard work should go a long way in New Mexico. 
He would find down there a big, new, unfenced, up- 
and-doing country and a set of sun-bronzed, iron-hard, 
self-reliant men of whom any country might be proud. 
These men are the modern conquistadores , for they 
have conquered sun and sand. To-day they are only 
commonplace farmers, but, when history has granted 
them the justice of perspective, they will be called the 
Pioneers. 



2>2 



II 

THE SKYLANDERS 



"Here still a lofty rock remains, 

On which the curious eye may trace 
(Now wasted half by wearing rains) 
The fancies of a ruder race. 

And long shall timorous Fancy see 
The painted chief, and pointed spear, 

And Reason's self shall bow the knee 
To shadows and delusions here." 



II 

THE SKYLANDERS 

SIX minutes after midnight the mail-train came 
thundering out of nowhere. With hissing steam 
and brakes asqueal it paused just long enough for me to 
drop off and then roared on its transcontinental way 
again to the accompaniment of a droning chant which 
quickly dropped into diminuendo, its scarlet tail 
lamps disappearing at forty miles an hour, leaving me 
abandoned in the utter darkness of the desert. The 
Casa Alvarado at Albuquerque, with its red-shaded 
candles and snowy napery, where I had dined only four 
hours before, seemed very far away. Some one flashed 
a lantern in my face and a voice behind it inquired: 

"Are you the gent that's goin' to Acoma?" 

"I am," said I, "if I can get there." 

"Well, I reckon you'll get there all right, seein' as 
how the trader at Laguna's sent a rig over for you. 
Bob made a little money on a bunch o' cattle a while 
back and he's been pretty damned independent ever 
since 'bout takin' folks over to Acoma. Says it's too 
hard on his horses. But when Bob says he'll do a 
thing he does it. Hi, Charlie !" he shouted, "you over 
there?" 

A guttural affirmative came out of the blackness. 
As the loquacious station agent made no offer to light 

35 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

my footsteps, I cautiously picked my way across the 
rails, slid down a steep embankment into a ditch, 
scrambled out of it, and descried before me the vague 
outlines of a ramshackle vehicle drawn by a pair of 
wiry, unkempt ponies. 

"How?" gnmted the driver, who, as my eyes 
became accustomed to the darkness, I saw was an 
Indian, his hair, plaited in two long braids with strands 
of vivid flannel interwoven, hanging in front of his 
shoulders, schoolgirl fashion. I clambered in, the 
Indian spoke to his ponies, and, breaking into a lope, 
they swung off across the desert, the wretched vehicle 
lurching and pitching behind them. 

It is an unforgettable experience, a ride across the 
New Mexican desert in the night-time. The sky is 
like purple velvet and the stars seem very near. The 
silence is not the peaceful stillness that comes with 
nightfall in settled regions, but the mysterious, un- 
canny hush that hangs over other ancient and deserted 
lands — Upper Egypt, for example, and Turkestan. 
Our way was lined with dim, fantastic shapes whose 
phantom arms seemed to warn or beckon or implore, 
but which, in the prosaic Hght of morning, resolved 
themselves into clumps of pinon, and mesquite, and 
prickly-pear. The ponies shied suddenly at a stirring 
in the underbrush — ^probably a rattlesnake disturbed 
— and in the distance a coyote gave dismal tongue. 
Slipping and sHding down a declivity so abrupt that 
the axles were level with the ponies' backs, we rattled 
across the stone-strewn bed of an arroyo seco, as they 

36 



THE SKYLANDERS 

term a dried-up watercourse in that half-Spanish re- 
gion, and clattered into a settlement whose squat, 
flat-roofed hovels of adobe, unlighted and silent as 
the houses of Pompeii, showed dimly on either hand. 

"Laguna?" I inquired. 

"Uh-huh," responded my taciturn companion, 
pulling up his ponies sharply before a dwelling con- 
siderably more pretentious than the rest. "Trader's," 
he added laconically. 

As, stiff, chilled, and weary, I scrambled down, 
the door swung open to reveal a lean figure in shirt and 
trousers, silhouetted by the light from a guttering 
candle. 

"I'm the trader," said he. "I reckon you're the 
party we've been expectin'. We ain't got much ac- 
commodation to offer you, but, such as it is, you're 
welcome to it. I'm afeard my youngsters'U keep you 
awake, though. I've got six on 'em an' they've all 
got the whoopin'-cough, so me an' my old woman 
hain't had a chanct to shet our eyes for the last week." 

It wasn't the cough-harassed children who kept 
me wide-eyed and tossing through the night, however. 
It was Sheridan, I think, who remarked that had the 
fleas of a certain bed upon which he once slept been 
unanimous, they could easily have pushed him out. 
Had the tiny hordes which were in possession of my 
couch had an insect Kitchener to organise and lead 
them, I should certainly have had to spend the night 
upon the floor. I learned afterward that the Indians 
of the neighbouring pueblos have a name for Laguna 

37 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

which, in the white man's tongue, means "Scratch- 
town." 

From Laguna to Acoma is a four hours' drive 
across the desert. It is very rough and more than 
once I feared that I should require the services of an 
osteopath to rejoint my vertebrae. And it is incon- 
ceivably dusty, the ponies kicking up clouds of fine, 
shifting sand which fills your eyes and nose and ears 
and sifts through your garments until you feel as 
though you were covered with sandpaper instead of 
skin. The sun beats down until the arid expanse of 
the desert is as hot as the whitewashed base of a rail- 
way-station stove at white heat. Everything consid- 
ered, it is not the sort of a drive that one would choose 
for pleasure, but it is a very wonderful drive never- 
theless, for the New Mexican desert is a kaleidoscope 
of colour. It is a land of black rocks and orange sand, 
flecked with discouraged, hopeless-looking clumps of 
sage-green vegetation; of violet, and amethyst, and 
purple mountain ranges; and overhead a sky of the 
brightest blue you will find anywhere outside a wash- 
tub. The cloud effects are the most beautiful I have 
ever seen, great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, 
like flocks of new-washed sheep, across the turquoise 
sky. Everywhere the colours are splashed on with a 
barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It is a regular 
back-drop of a country; its scenery looks as though it 
should have been painted on a curtain. When a party 
of Indians, with scarlet handkerchiefs twisted about 
their heads pirate fashion, lope by astride of spotted 

38 



THE SKYLANDERS 

ponies, the illusion is complete. "You're not really 
in New Mexico, you know," you say to yourself. 
"This is much too theatrical to be real. You're sitting 
in an orchestra chair watching a play, that's what 
you're doing." 

Swinging sharply around the shoulder of a sand- 
dune, a mesa — a table-land of rock — reared itself out 
of the plain as unexpectedly as a slap in the face. The 
driver pointed unconcernedly with his whip. "Z,a 
Mesa Encantada/' he grunted. The Enchanted Mesa ! 
Was there ever a name which so reeked with mystery 
and romance? Picture, if you can, a bandbox-shaped 
rock, almost flat on top and covering as much ground 
as a good-sized city square, higher than the Times 
Building in New York and with sides almost as per- 
pendicular, set down in the middle of the flattest, 
yellowest desert the imagination can conceive. Seen 
from the distance, it suggests the stump of an incon- 
ceivably gigantic tree — a tree a thousand feet in diam- 
eter and sawed squarely off four hundred and thirty 
feet above the ground. On one side it is as sheer and 
smooth as that face of Gibraltar which looks Spain- 
ward, and when the evening sun strikes it slantingly 
it turns the monstrous mass of sandstone into a pile 
of rosy coral. It is one of the most impressive things 
that I have ever seen. SoHtary, silent, mysterious, 
redolent of legend and superstition, older than Time 
itself, it suggests, without in any way resembling, 
those Colossi of Memnon which stare out across the 
desert from ruined Thebes. 

39 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Those disputatious cousins Science and Tradi- 
tion seem to have agreed for once that the original 
Acoma stood on the top of the Mesa Encantada, or 
Katzimo, as the Indians call it, in the days when the 
world was very young. Ever since Katzimo first at- 
tracted scientific attention the archaeologists have quar- 
relled like cats and dogs over this question of whether 
it had ever been inhabited, just as they are quarrelling 
in Palestine as to the site of Calvary. A few years ago 
the Smithsonian Institution, desirous of settling the 
controversy for good and all, despatched to New Mex- 
ico a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind, who 
succeeded in performing the supposedly impossible feat 
of scaUng the sheer cUffs which, from time beyond 
reckoning, have guarded the secret of the mesa. On 
the plateau at the top he found fragments of earthen- 
ware utensils, which would seem to prove quite con- 
clusively that it had been inhabited in long-past ages 
by human beings, thus supporting the traditions which 
prevail among the Indians regarding this mighty 
monolith. Whether the Enchanted Mesa has ever 
been inhabited I do not know; no one knows; and, to 
tell the truth, it does not greatly matter. According 
to the legend current among the Pueblos, this island 
in the air was originally accessible by means of a huge, 
detached fragment leaning against it at such an angle 
that it formed a precarious and perilous ladder to the 
top. Its difficulty of access was more than compen- 
sated for, however, by its security from the attacks of 
enemies, whether on two feet or four, for Katzimo is 

40 




From a photograph by A . C. Vroman. 



'A bandbox-shaped rock, higher than the Times Building in New York and with 
sides almost as perpendicular." 




From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. 



"The mesa on which the modem Acoma is perched might be likened to a gigantic billiard-table 
three hundred and fifty-seven feet high." 

ACOMA: SUPPOSED ANCIENT SITE AND PRESENT SITE. 



THE SKYLANDERS 

supposed to have echoed to human voices in those dim 
and distant days when the mastodon and the dinosaur 
roamed the land. The Indian legend has it that, while 
the men of the tribe were absent on a hunting expedi- 
tion and the able-bodied women were hoeing corn in 
the fields below, some cataclysm of nature — ^most 
probably an earthquake — jarred loose the ladder rock 
and toppled it over into the plain, leaving the town on 
the summit as completely cut off from human help as 
though it were on another planet. The women and 
children thus isolated perished miserably from starva- 
tion, and their spirits, so the Indians will assure you, 
still haunt the summit of Katzimo. On any windy 
night you can hear them for yourself, moaning and 
wailing for the help that never came. That is why it 
were easier to persuade a Mississippi darky to spend 
a night in a graveyard than to induce an Indian to 
linger in the vicinity of the Enchanted Mesa after dark. 
The survivors of the tribe chose as the site of 
their new town the top of a somewhat lower mesa, 
three miles or so from their former home. If the En- 
chanted Mesa resembles a titanic bandbox, the mesa 
on which the modern Acoma is perched might be 
likened to a gigantic bilhard-table, three hundred and 
fifty-seven feet high, seventy acres in area upon its 
level top, and supported by precipices which are not 
merely perpendicular but in many cases actually over- 
hanging. It presents one of the most striking exam- 
ples of erosion in the world, does Acoma, the sand 
which has been hurled against it by the wind of ages, 

41 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

as by a natural sand-blast, having cut the soft rock 
into forms more fantastic than were ever conjured up 
by Little Nemo in his dreams. Battlements, turrets, 
arches, minarets, and gargoyles of weather-worn, 
tawny-tinted rock rise on every hand. There are 
two routes to the summit and both of them require 
leathern lungs and seasoned sinews. One, called, if I 
remember rightly, the "Padre's Path," is Httle more 
than a crevasse in the solid rock, its ascent necessitat- 
ing the vigorous use of knees and elbows as well as 
hands and feet, it being about as easy to negotiate as 
the outside of the Statue of Liberty. The other path, 
which is considerably longer, suggests the stone-paved 
ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages — and, 
when you come to think about it, that is precisely 
what it is — the resemblance being heightened by the 
massive battlements of eroded rock between which it 
winds and the strings of patient donkeys which plod 
up it, faggot-laden. Though of fair width near the 
bottom, it gradually narrows as it zigzags upward, 
finally becoming so slim that there is not room between 
the face of the cliif and the brink of the precipice for 
two donkeys to pass. It was at this inauspicious spot 
that I first encountered one of these dwellers in the sky 
— "skylanders" they might fittingly be called. He 
was a low-browed, sullen-looking fellow, with a skin the 
colour of a well-worn saddle and an expression about as 
pleasant as a rainy morning. His shock of coarse 
black hair had been bobbed just below the ears and 
was kept back from his eyes by the inevitable handa; 

42 



THE SKYLANDERS 

his legs were encased in chaparejos of fringed buck- 
skin, and his shirt tails fluttered free. He came jog- 
ging down the perilous pathway astride of a calico 
donkey and, with the background of rocks and sand, 
cut a very striking and savage figure indeed. "He'll 
make a perfectly bully picture," I said to myself, and, 
suiting the action to the thought, I unUmbered my 
camera and ambushed myself behind a projecting 
shoulder of rock. As he swung into the range of my 
lens I snapped the shutter. It was speeded up to a 
hundredth of a second, but in much less time than that 
he had dismounted and was coming for me with a 
club. I have read somewhere that the Acomas are a 
mild-mannered, inoffensive folk. Well, perhaps. Still, 
I was glad that I had in my jacket pocket the largest- 
sized automatic used by a civilised people, and I was 
still gladder when Man-That-Wouldn't-Have-His-Pic- 
ture-Taken, gHmpsing its ominous outline through the 
cloth, moved sullenly away, shaking his stick and 
muttering sentiments which needed no translation. 
He was an artist in the way he laid on his curses, was 
that Indian. An army mule-skinner would have taken 
off his hat to him in admiration. 

Of all the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma 
is the most interesting by far. Indeed, I do not 
think that I am permitting my enthusiasm to get the 
better of my discrimination when I class it with Urga, 
Khiva, Mecca, the troglodyte town of Medenine in 
southern Tunisia, and Timbuktu as one of the half 
dozen most interesting semicivilised places in ex- 

43 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

istence. Where else in all the world can you find a 
town hanging, as it were, between land and sky and 
reached by some of the dizziest trails ever trod by 
human feet; a town of many-floored but doorless 
dwellings, which have ladders instead of stairs and 
whose windows are of gypsum instead of glass; a 
town where the women build and own the houses and 
the men weave the women's gowns; where the hus- 
bands take the names of their wives and the children 
the names of their mothers; where the belongings of 
a dead man are destroyed upon his grave and the 
ghosts are distracted so that his spirit may have time 
to escape; a town where religious mysteries, as incredi- 
ble as those of voodooism and as jealously guarded as 
those of Lhasa, are performed in an underground 
chamber as impossible of access by the iminitiated as 
the Kaaba? Where else shall you find such a place as 
that, I ask you? Tell me that. 

Acoma has the unassailable distinction of being 
the oldest continuously inhabited town within our 
borders, though how old the archaeologists have been 
unable to conjecture, much less positively say. Cer- 
tain it is that it was ancient when the Great Navigator 
set foot on the beach of San Salvador; that it was 
hoary with antiquity when the Great Captain and his 
mail-clad men-at-arms came marching up from Vera 
Cruz for the taking of Mexico. One needs to be very 
close under its beethng cHffs before any sign of the 
village can be detected, as the houses are of the same 
color and, indeed of the same material as the rock 

44 




From a photograph by A . C. Vroman. 

"The massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds . . 
stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages.' 



suggest the 




From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. 



"You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access 
to the hold of a ship." 

ACOMA AS IT IS TO-DAY. 



THE SKYLANDERS 

upon which they stand and so far above the plain 
that, as old Casteneda, the chronicler of Coronado's 
expedition in 1540, records, "it was a very good musket 
that could throw a ball as high." The lofty situation 
of the town and the effect of bleakness produced by 
the entire absence of vegetation and by the cold, grey 
rock of which it is built reminded me of San Marino, 
that mountain-top capital of a tiny republic in the 
Apennines, while in the startling abruptness with 
which the mesa rears itself out of the desert there is a 
suggestion of those strange monasteries of Meteora, 
perched on their rocky columns above the Thessalian 
plain. The village proper consists of three parallel 
blocks of houses running east and west perhaps a 
thousand feet and skyward forty. They are, in fact, 
primeval apartment-houses, each block being parti- 
tioned by cross-walls into separate httle homes which 
have no interior commimication with each other. 
Each of these blocks is three stories high, with a sheer 
wall behind but terraced in front, so that it looks like 
a flight of three gigantic steps. (At the sister pueblo 
of Taos, a hundred miles or so to the northward, this 
novel architectural scheme has been carried even 
further by building the houses six and even seven 
stories high and terracing them on all four sides so 
that they form a pyramid.) The second story is set 
well back on the roof of the first, thus giving it a 
broad, imcovered terrace across its entire front, and 
the third story is similarly placed upon the second. 
In Acoma, which has about seven hundred people, 

45 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

there are scarcely a dozen doors on the ground; and 
these indicate the abodes of those progressive citizens 
who, not satisfied with what was good enough for 
their fathers, must be for ever experimenting with some 
new-fangled device. Barring these cases of recent 
innovation, there are no doors to the lower floor, the 
only access to a house being by a rude ladder to the 
first terrace. If you are making a call on the occu- 
pants of the first story, you wriggle through a tiny 
trap-door in the floor of the second and Hterally drop 
in upon them — so literally that your hosts see your 
feet before they see your face. It is a novel expe- 
rience . . . yes, indeed. You gain access to the first 
floor of an Acoma dwelHng precisely as you gain ac- 
cess to the hold of a ship — ^by cHmbing a ladder to the 
deck and then descending through a hatchway. If you 
wish to leave your visiting-card at the third-floor 
apartment or if you have a hankering to see the view 
from the topmost roof, you can ascend quite easily by 
means of queer little steps notched in the division 
walls. The ground floor is always occupied by the 
senior members of the family, the second terrace is 
allotted to the daughter first married, and the upper 
flat goes to the daughter who gets a husband next. 
If there are other married daughters they must seek 
apartments elsewhere or Hve with grandpa and grandma 
in the basement. 

Most writers about Acoma seem to be particularly 
impressed with the cleanliness of its inhabitants and 
the neatness of their homes., I don't Hke to shatter 

46 



THE SKYLANDERS 

any illusions, but it struck me that the much- vaunted 
neatness of these people consisted mainly in covering 
their beds with scarlet blankets and whitewashing 
their walls. I have heard visitors exclaim enthusias- 
tically as they peered in through an open doorway: 
"Why, I wouldn't mind sleeping there at all." They 
are perfectly welcome to so far as I am concerned. As 
for me, I much prefer a warm blanket and the open 
mesa. All of the Pueblo Indians are as ignorant of 
the elements of sanitation as a Congo black. If you 
doubt it, visit one of these sky cities on a scorching 
summer's day when there is no wind blowing. As 
an old frontiersman in Albuquerque confided to me: 
"Say, friend, I'd ruther have a skunk hangin' round 
my tent than to have to spend a night to leeward o' 
one of them there Hopi towns." 

Civilisation has evidently found the rocky path 
to Acoma too steep to climb, for when I was there not 
a soul in the place spoke a word of EngHsh. There 
was a daughter of the village who had been educated 
at Carlisle — Marie was her name, I think — ^but she 
was away on a visit. Perhaps she couldn't stand the 
loneliness of being the only civilised person in the 
community. That is one of the deplorable features 
incident to our system of Indian education. A youth 
is sent to Carlisle or Hampton or Riverside, as the 
case may be, and after being broken to the white man's 
ways is sent back to his own people on the theory 
that, by force of example, he will alter their mode of 
living. But he rarely does anything of the sort, for 

47 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

his fellow tribesmen either resent his attempts to in- 
troduce innovations or treat him with the same con- 
temptuous tolerance with which the hidebound resi- 
dents of a country village regard the youth who is 
"college Tamed." So, after a time, becoming dis- 
couraged by the futility of attempting to teach his 
people something that they don't want to know, he 
either goes out into the world to earn his own liveli- 
hood as best he may or else he again leaves his shirt 
tails outside his breeches, daubs his face with paint 
on dance days, and, forgetting how to use a fork and 
napkin, goes back to the manners and usages of his 
fathers. But you mustn't get the idea that Acoma is 
wholly uncivilised, for it isn't. One household has an 
iron bed with large brass knobs, another boasts a 
rocking-chair, and a third possesses a sewing-machine. 
But the most convincing proof that these untutored 
children of the sky possess a strain of culture is in the 
fact that Acoma can boast no phonograph to greet the 
visitor with the raucous strains of "Every Little Move- 
ment" and "Alexander's Ragtime Band." 

In many respects the most remarkable feature of 
Acoma is its immense adobe church, built upward of 
three centuries ago. It is remarkable because every 
stick and every adobe brick in it was carried up the 
heart-breaking, back-breaking trails from the plains 
three hundred feet below on the backs of patient 
Indians. There are timbers in that church a foot and 
a half square and forty feet long, brought by human 
muscle alone from the mountains a long day's march 

48 



THE SKYLANDERS 

away. And it is no tiny chapel, remember, but a 
building of enormous proportions, with walls ten feet 
thick and sixty feet high, and covering more ground 
than any modem church in America. As a monument 
of patient toil it is hardly less wonderful than the 
Pyramids; it was as long in building as the Children 
of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness. Above 
its gaudy altar hangs a royal gift, the town's most 
treasured possession — a painting of San Jos6, pre- 
sented to Acoma two centuries and a half ago by his 
Most Catholic Majesty Charles the Second of Aragon 
and Castile. Faded and time-dimmed though it is, 
that picture once nearly caused an Indian war. Some 
years ago the neighbouring pueblo of Laguna, suffering 
from drought and cattle sickness and all manner of 
disasters, looked on the prosperity of Acoma and 
ascribed it to the patronage of the painted San Jose. 
So Laguna, beheving that if the saint could bring pros- 
perity to one pueblo, he could bring it to another, 
asked Acoma for the loan of the picture, and, after a 
tribal council, the request was granted. Their con- 
fidence in the saint was justified, for no sooner had 
the picture been transferred to the walls of Laguna's 
bell-hung, mud-walled mission church than the rains 
came and the crops sprouted, and the cattle throve, 
and the tourists, leaning from their car windows, 
bought more pottery and blankets than they ever had 
before. After a time, however, Acoma gently inti- 
mated to Laguna that a loan was not a gift and asked 
for the return of the picture. Whereupon the Lagunas 

49 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

retorted that if possession was nine points of the law 
in the white man's country, in the Indian country it 
was ten points — and then some, and that if the Acomas 
wanted the picture they could come and take it — if 
they could. For several weeks there was much sharpen- 
ing of knives and cleaning of Winchesters in both 
pueblos, and at night the high mesa of Acoma re- 
sounded to those same war chants which preceded the 
massacre of Zaldivar and his Spaniards. But the 
saner counsels of the Indian agent prevailed, for these 
hill-folk are at heart a peaceable people, and they 
were induced to submit the dispute over the picture 
to the arbitrament of the white man's courts. Per- 
haps it was well for the peace of central New Mexico 
that Judge Kirby Benedict, who heard the case, de- 
cided in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered the picture 
restored to Acoma forthwith. But when the messen- 
gers sent from Acoma to bring the sacred treasure 
back arrived at Laguna they found that the picture 
had mysteriously disappeared. But while riding de- 
jectedly back to Acoma to break the news of the 
calamity they discovered under a mesquite bush, 
midway between the two pueblos — God be praised ! — 
the missing picture. The Acomas instantly recognised, 
of course, that San Jose, released from bondage, had 
started homeward of his own volition and had doubt- 
less sought shelter in the shade of the mesquite bush 
until the heat of the day had passed. He hangs once 
more on the wall of the ancient church, just where he 
did when he came, all fresh and shiny, from Madrid, 

50 



THE SKYLANDERS 

and every morning the hill people file in and cross 
themselves before him and mutter a little prayer. 

In front of the church is the village graveyard, a 
depression in the rock forty feet deep and two hundred 
square, filled with earth brought on the backs of 
women from the far plain. It took them nearly forty 
years to make it. Is it any wonder that the patient, 
moccasined feet of centuries have sunk their imprint 
in the rock six inches deep? And the work was done 
by women! Imagine the New York suffragettes car- 
rying enough dirt in sacks to the top of the Metropoli- 
tan Building to make a graveyard there. The bones 
lie thick on the surface soil, now literally a bank of 
human limestone. Dig down into that ghastly stratum 
and you would doubtless find among the myriads of 
bleached and grinning skulls some that had been cleft 
by sword-blade or pierced by bullet — ^grim reminders 
of that day, now three centuries agone, when Oiiate's 
men-at-arms carried Acoma by storm and put three 
thousand of its defenders to the sword, as was the 
Spanish custom. A funeral in Acoma's sun-seared 
graveyard is worth journeying a long, long way to see. 
When the still form, wrapped in its costhest blanket, 
has been lowered into its narrow resting-place among 
the skeletons of its fathers; when upon the earth above 
it has been broken the symboUc jar of water; when the 
relatives have brought forth pottery and weapons and 
clothing to be broken and rent upon the grave that they 
may go with their departed owner; when all these 
weird rites have been performed the waiHng mourners 

SI 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

file away to those desolate houses where the shamans 
are blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not 
find the trail of the soul which has set out on its four 
days' journey to the Land That Lies Beyond the 
Ranges. It is a strange business. 

American dominion has not yet resulted in de- 
stroying the picturesque costimies of the Acomas, and 
I hope to Heaven that it never will. Civilisation has 
enough to answer for in substituting the unlovely gar- 
ments of Europe for the beautiful and becoming cos- 
timaes of China and Japan. In Acoma the people 
always look as though they were dressed up for visi- 
tors, although, as a matter of fact, they are nothing 
of the sort. Like all barbarians, they are fond of 
colours. The tendencies of a man may be pretty ac- 
curately gauged by the manner in which he wears his 
shirt. If he lets it hang outside his trousers he is a 
dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and you can make up 
your mind that he has no glass in his windows or doors 
to his ground floor. But if he tucks it into his trou- 
sers, white-man fashion, it may be taken as a sign that 
he is a progressive, an aboriginal Bull Mooser, as it 
were, in which case he usually goes a step further by 
hiding the picturesque banda, with its suggestion of the 
buccaneers, beneath a sombrero several sizes too large. 
On dance days, however, liberals and conservatives 
alike discard their shirts and trousers for the primi- 
tive breech-clouts of their savage ancestors, streak and 
ring their lithe, brown bodies with red and yellow pig- 
ments, surmount their none too lovely features with 

52 






'*^, 



■>s.. 



From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. 

"DANCE MAD!" 

"On dance days they streak and ring their lithe bronze bodies with red and yellow pigments, 
surmount their none too lovely features with fantastic head-dresses, and transform 
themselves into the creatures of a bad dream." 



THE SKYLANDERS 

fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into 
very ferocious and repellent figures indeed. A Hopi 
in his dancing dress looks like the creature of a bad 
dream. 

The women wear a peculiar sort of tunic, some- 
what resembling that worn by their cousins on the 
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which exposes the neck and 
one round, bronze shoulder. The garment is well 
chosen, for the Acomas have the finest necks and busts 
of any women that I know. This is due, no doubt, 
to the fact that they carry all the water used in their 
houses from the communal reservoir in tinajas bal- 
anced on their heads, frequently up a ladder and two 
steep flights of stairs, thus unconsciously developing a 
litheness of figure and a mould of form that would 
arouse the envy of Gaby des Lys. Over their shoidders 
is drawn a Uttle shawl, generally of vivid scarlet. Then 
there is more scarlet in the kilts which reach from 
the waist to the knees and a contrast in the black 
stockings which come to the ankle, leaving bare their 
dainty feet — the smallest and prettiest women's feet 
that I have ever seen. The feet of all these hill-folk 
are abnormally small, the result, doubtless, of the con- 
stant clutching of the uneven rock. The picturesque- 
ness of the women's costumes is enormously increased 
by the quantities of turquoise-studded silver jewellery 
which they affect, which tinkles musically when they 
walk. This jewellery, which they hammer out of 
Mexican pesos, obtaining the turquoises from the rich 
and highly profitable local mines, forms one of the 

53 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Acomas' chief sources of revenue, for they sell great 
quantities of it to the agents of the curiosity dealers 
along the railway and these resell it to the tourists on 
the transcontinental trains at a profit of many hun- 
dred per cent. They make several other forms of deco- 
rative wares: blankets, for example — though the Hopi 
blankets are not to be spoken of in the same breath 
with the beautiful products of the looms of their un- 
friendly Navajo neighbours — and pottery jars which 
they patiently decorate in fine grey-black designs and 
burn over dung-fed fires. Everything considered, 
their work is probably the most artistic done by any 
Indians in America to-day. 

But to return to the highway of narrative from 
which I find that I have inadvertently wandered. 
When a girl is old enough to get married, which is 
usually about the time that she reaches her twelfth 
birthday, she is expected to arrange her lustrous blue- 
black hair in two large whorls, like doughnuts, one on 
each side of her dainty head. The whorl is supposed 
to typify the squash blossom, which is the Hopi em- 
blem of maidenhood. To arrange this compHcated 
coiffure is a long day's task, and after it is once made 
the owner puts herself to acute discomfort by sleep- 
ing on a wooden head-rest, so as not to disarrange it. 
When a girl marries, which she generally does very early 
in her teens, she must no longer wear the nash-mi, as 
the whorls are called. Instead, her hair is done up in 
two pendent rolls, symboHcal of the ripened squash, 
which is the Hopi emblem of fruitfulness. And after 

54 



THE SKYLANDERS 

you have seen the litters of fat, brown babies which 
gambol like puppies before every door, and the rows of 
roguish children's faces which peer down at you from 
every sun-scorched housetop, you begin to think that 
there must be some virtue in this symbolical hair- 
dressing after all. 

Acoma is Mrs. Pankhurst's dream come true. 
From time beyond reckoning the women have pos- 
sessed the privileges and power for which their pale- 
faced sisters are so strenuously striving. Not only is 
Mrs. Acoma the ruler of her household but she is 
absolute owner of the house and all that is in it. In 
fact, a man is not permitted to own a house at all, 
and if his wife wishes to put him out of her house she 
may. Instead of a woman taking her husband's name 
after marriage, he takes hers, and the children that 
they have also take the name of their mother. In other 
words, if Mr. Smith marries Miss Jones he becomes 
Mr. Jones and their children are the little Joneses. 
And the men accept their feminine roles even to play- 
ing nursemaid while the women do the work, it being 
not the exception but the rule to see even the gover- 
nors and war captains dandhng squalling papooses on 
their knees or toting them up and down the main 
street on their backs. A comic artist couldn't raise a 
smile in Acoma, for he would find that all his pet 
jokes are there accepted facts. 

Even more interesting than Acoma, from an archi- 
tectural standpoint, is the pyramid pueblo of Taos 
(pronounced as though it were spelled ^^tous" if you 

55 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

please). This strange town — ^in many respects the 
most extraordinary in the world — ^is built on the floor 
of a mountain-girdled valley, some seventy miles due 
north from Santa F€, and can best be reached by leav- 
ing the main Hne of the railway at Barrancas or Servil- 
leta and driving out to the pueblo by wagon or stage. 
Though it is quite possible to reach Taos from Santa 
F6 in a single day, the journey is a very fatiguing one, 
it being much better to spend the night at the ranch- 
house at Arroyo Hondo and go on to the pueblo in 
comfort the next morning. There are really two towns 
— the white man's and the Indian's — four miles apart. 
White man's Taos consists of Httle more than a sun- 
swept plaza bordered on all four sides by Mexican 
houses of adobe, while running off from the plaza are 
numerous dim and narrow alleys, likewise lined by 
humble dwellings of whitewashed mud, in one of 
which that immortal hero of American boyhood. Kit 
Carson, Hved and died. For Taos, you must under- 
stand, was long the terminus of that historic trail by 
which the traders and trappers from Kansas and Mis- 
souri went down into the Southwest. Here, then, came 
such famous frontiersmen as Carson and Jim Bridger, 
and Manuel Lisa, and Jedediah Smith to barter beads 
and calico and rum for blankets and turquoises and 
furs. Save for a few greybeards who dwell in their 
memories of the exciting past, the frontiersmen have 
all passed roimd that dark turning from which no 
man returns, and Taos plaza hears the jingle of their 
spurs and the clatter of their high-heeled boots no 

56 




Fro)n a pliolosraph copyright by Fred Harvey. 

His first riding lesson. 




From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey. 

The dancing lesson. 




From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey. 

The history lesson. 

THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HOPI. 



THE SKYLANDERS 

more. In their stead have come another breed of 
men, who carry palettes instead of pistols and who 
confront the Indian with brushes instead of bowie- 
knives; for Taos, because of its extraordinary wealth 
of sun and shadow, of yellow deserts and purple 
mesas, of scarlet blankets and white walls, has become 
the rendezvous for a group of brilUant painters who 
are perpetuating on canvas the red men of the terraced 
houses. Seen at dusk or in the dimness of the early 
dawn, Taos bears a striking resemblance to the low, 
squat pyramids at Sakkara, for it consists, in fact, of 
two huge pyramidal structures, one six the other 
seven stories high, with a stream meandering between. 
In their general construction the houses of Taos are 
like those of Acoma, but instead of being terraced only 
on the front, they are built in two huge squares which 
are terraced on all four sides, looking from a Httle 
distance like the pyramids which children erect with 
stone building-blocks. These two huge apartment 
houses together accommodate upward of eight hun- 
dred souls. Like other Hopi dwellings, they can only 
be entered by means of ladders, pulling up the ladder 
after him being the Pueblo's way of bolting his door. 
Though it needs iron muscles and leathern lungs to 
reach the apartments at the top, the view over the 
surrounding country well repays the exertion. Taos 
presents, I suppose, the nearest approach to socialistic 
life that this country has yet known, for the houses are 
built and occupied communally, the truck-gardens, 
grain-fields, and grazing lands are held in common, and 

57 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

if there is a surplus of hay or grain it is sold by the 
community. 

The communal form of government existing 
among the Hopi has proven so successful in practice 
that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long since 
adopted the policy of leaving well enough alone. Al- 
though these Indians of the terraced houses are wards 
of the nation, to use a term which has become almost 
ironic, the white man's law stops short at the bound- 
aries of their pueblos, for they make their own laws, 
enforce them with their own police, maintain their 
own courts of justice, and inflict their own peculiar 
punishments. In Taos, for example, the stocks are 
still used as a punishment for misdemeanours, though 
the Indians go the Puritans one better by clamping 
down the culprit's head as well as his hands and feet. 
At the head of the Pueblo system of government is an 
elected governor, known as the cacique, whose word is 
law with a capital L. Associated with him is a council 
of wise men called mayores, whose powers are a sort of 
cross between those of a board of aldermen and a col- 
lege faculty. The activities of this patriarchal council 
frequently assume an almost parental character, it 
being customary for it to advise the young men of the 
pueblo when to marry — and whom. If an Indian gets 
into a dispute with a white man the case is tried in 
the county court, but differences between themselves 
are settled according to their own time-honoured cus- 
toms. Though the police force of Acoma consists of 
but a solitary constable, whose uniform is a gilt cord 

58 



I. I :i¥i^:p 




THE SKYLANDERS 

around the crown of his sombrero, he takes himself 
quite as seriously as a member of the Broadway traffic 
squad, and, judging from his magnificent physique 
and the extremely businesslike revolver swinging from 
his hip, I doubt not that he would prove quite as 
efficient in an emergency. 

The Hopi are as stern and inflexible in the admin- 
istration of those laws regulating the conduct of the 
community as were the Old Testament prophets. 
When a member of the tribe plays football with the 
public morals, as occasionally happens, he or she is 
tried by the mayores and, if found guilty, is expelled 
from the pueblo, bag and baggage. The system is as 
efficacious as it is inexpensive. As it chanced, I had 
an opportunity to see this novel form of punishment 
in operation. I was descending from the mesa at 
Acoma with my Laguna driver, who, in the absence of 
Carlisle-taught Marie, had served as my interpreter. 
He was a surly, taciturn fellow whose name, if my 
memory serves me faithfully, was Kill Hi. It should 
have been Kill Joy. As we reached the foot of the 
precipitous path my attention was attracted by a 
crowd, composed of the major portion of the pueblo's 
population, which was stolidly watching four Indians — ■ 
the constable and three others — loading a woman 
whose hands and feet were bound with ropes into a 
wagon. Despite her screams and struggles, they tossed 
her in as indifferently as they would a sack of meal. 

"Who is she? What's the matter?" I asked 
Kill Hi. 

59 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"Oh, nothin' much," was the indifferent answer. 
"She damn bad woman. They no want her here. 
They tell her to get out quick — vamoose. She no go. 
So they take her off in wagon like you see." 

"But what are they going to do with her?" 

"Oh, I don* know. Dump her out in desert, 
mebbe." 

"But what will happen to her?" I persisted. 
"Won't she starve to death?" 

"Oh, I don' know," said Kill Hi carelessly, 
cramping the buckboard so that I could get in. 
"Mebbe. P'raps. Acomas, they queer folks; not like 
other people." 

He was quite right — they certainly are not. 



60 



Ill 

CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 



"We're the men that always march a bit before 

Though we cannot tell the reason for the same; 
We're the fools that pick the lock that holds the door — 

Play and lose and pay the candle for the game. 
There's no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go; 

There's no painted post to point the right-of-way, 
But we swing our sweat-grained helves and we chop a path ourselves 

To To-morrow from the land of Yesterday." 



Ill 

CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

THEY came bucketing into town at a hand-gallop, 
hat brims flapping, spurs jingling, tie-down straps 
streaming, their ponies kicking the dusty road into a 
yellow haze behind them. With their gay neckerchiefs 
and sheepskin chaps they formed as vivid a group as 
one could find outside a Remington, They pulled up 
with a great clatter of hoofs in front of the Golden 
West saloon and, leaving their panting mounts stand- 
ing dejectedly, heads to the ground and reins trailing, 
went stamping into the bar. Having had previous 
experience with their sort, I made bold to follow them 
through the swinging doors; for more unvarnished 
facts about a locality, its people, politics, progress, and 
prospects, are to be had over a mahogany bar than any 
place I know except a barber's chair. 

"What'U it be, boys?" sang out one of them, as 
they sprawled themselves over the polished mahogany. 
I expected to see the bartender matter-of-coursely 
shove out a black bottle and six small glasses, for, ac- 
cording to all the accepted canons of the cow country, 
as I had known it a dozen years before, there was only 
one kind of a drink ever ordered at a bar. So, when 
two of the party expressed a preference for ginger ale 
and the other four allowed that they would take Icmon- 

63 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

ade, I felt like going to the door and taking another 
look at the straggling frontier town and at the cactus- 
dotted desert which surrounded it, just to make sure 
I really was in Arizona and not at Chautauqua, New 
York. 

It required scant finesse to engage one of the lem- 
onade drinkers in amicable and illuminating conver- 
sation. 

"Round-up hereabouts?" I inquired, by way of 
making an opening. 

"Nope," said my questionee. "Leastways not as 
I knows of. You see," he continued confidentially, 
"we've quit cow-punching. We've tied up with the 
movies." 

"With the what?" I queried. 

"The movies — the moving-picture people, you 
know," he explained. "You see, the folks back East 
have gone plumb crazy on these here Wild West 
picture plays and we're gratifying 'em at so much per. 
Wagon-train attacked by Indians — good-lookin' girl 
carried off by one of the bucks — cow-punchers to the 
rescue, and all that sort of thing. It's good pay and 
easy work, and the grub's first-rate. Yes, sirree, it's 
got cow-punching beaten to a frazzle. I reckon you're 
from the East yourself, ain't you?" 

I admitted that I was, adding that my bag was 
labeUed "New York." 

"The hell you say!" he exclaimed, regarding me 
with suddenly increased respect. "From what I 
hearn tell that sure must be some wicked town. 
Gambling joints runnin' wide open, an' every one packs 

64 




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CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

a gun, I hear, an' shootin' scraps so frequent no one 
thinks nothing about 'em. It ain't a safe place to Hve, 
I say. Now, down here in Arizony things is different. 
We're peaceable, we are. We don't stand for no pro- 
misc'us gun-play and, barring one or two of the mining 
towns, there ain't a poker palace left, and I wouldn't 
be so blamed surprised if this State went dry in a year 
or two. Well, s'long, friend," he added, sweeping ojEf 
his hat, "I'm pleased to've made your acquaintance. 
The feller with the camera's waitin' an' we've got to 
get out an' run off a few miles of film so's to amuse 
the people back East." 

I stood in the doorway of the Golden West saloon 
and watched them as they swung easily into their sad- 
dles and went tearing up the street in a rolling cloud 
of dust. Then I went on my way, marvelling at the 
mutability of things. "That's what civilisation does 
for a country," I said to myself. "Lemonade instead 
of liquor; policemen instead of pistol fighters; cow- 
boys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of 
corralling cattle." At first blush — I confess it frankly 
— I was as disappointed as a boy who wakes up to 
find it raining on circus morning, for I had revisited 
the Southwest expecting to find the same easy-going, 
devil-may-care, whoop-her-up-boys Hfe so character- 
istic of that country's territorial days. Instead I 
found a busy, prosperous State, still picturesque in 
many of its aspects but as orderly and peaceful as 
Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning. 

It wasn't much of a country, was Arizona, the 
first time I set foot in it, upward of a dozen years ago. 

6S 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

A howling wilderness is what the Old Testament 
prophets would have called it, I suppose, and they 
wouldn't have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses 
and his Israelites could not have wandered through a 
region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush and 
cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple 
mountains in the distance and, flaming in a cloudless 
sky, a sun pitiless as fate. Cattlemen and sheepmen 
still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro players 
still drove a roaring business in the mining-camps and 
the cow- towns; men's coats screened but did not al- 
together conceal the ominous outline of the six-shooter. 
As building materials adobe and corrugated iron still 
predominated. Portland cement, the barbed-wire 
fence, the irrigation ditch, and alfalfa had yet to come 
into their own. In those days — and they were not so 
very long ago, if you please — ^A-r-i-z-o-n-a spelled 
Frontier with a capital F. 

I recall a little incident of that first visit, insignif- 
icant enough in itself but strangely prophetical of the 
changes which were to come. Riding across the most 
desolate and inhospitable country I had ever seen, a 
roughly written notice, nailed over the door of a ram- 
shackle adobe ranch-house standing solitary in the desert, 
riveted my attention. The ill-formed letters, scrawled 
apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar, read: 

40 MILES FROM WOOD 
40 MILES FROM WATER 
40 FEET FROM HELL 
GOD BLESS OUR HOME 
66 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

As I pulled up my horse, fascinated by the grim hu- 
mour of the lines, the rancher appeared in the doorway 
and, with the hospitality characteristic of those who 
dwell in the earth's waste places, bade me dismount 
and rest. Such of his face as was not bearded had been 
tanned by sun and wind to the colour of a well-smoked 
brier; corduroy trousers belted over lean hips and a 
flannel shirt open at the throat accentuated a figure as 
iron-hard and sinewy as a mountain-Hon. About his 
eyes, puckered at the outer corners into innumerable 
little wrinkles by much staring across sun-scorched 
ranges, lurked the humorous twinkle which suggested 
the Yankee or the Celt. 

"I stopped to read your sign," I explained. "If 
things are as discouraging as all that I suppose you'll 
pull out of here the first chance you get?" 

"Not by a jugful!" he exclaimed. "I'm here to 
stay. You mustn't take that sign too seriously; it's 
just my brand of humour. This country don't look up 
to much now, I admit, but come back here in a few 
years, friend, and you'll need to be introduced to it 
all over again." 

"But you've no water," I remarked sceptically. 

"We'll have that before long. You see," he ex- 
plained eagerly, "the Colorado's not so very far away 
and there's considerable talk about the government's 
damming it and bringing the water down here in di- 
version canals and irrigation ditches. If the govern- 
ment doesn't help us, then we'll sink artesian wells 
and get the water that way. Once get water on it and 

67 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

this soil'U do the rest. Why, friend, this land'U raise 
anything — anything! I'm going to put in alfalfa the 
first year or two, until I get on my feet, and then I'm 
going to raise citrus fruits. There's never enough 
frost here to worry about, and all we need is water to 
make this the finest soil for orange growing on God's 
green earth. Just remember what I'm telling you," 
he concluded impressively, tapping my knee with his 
forefinger to emphasise his words, "though things 
look damned discouraging just now, this is going to be 
a great country some day." 

As I rode across the desert I turned in my saddle 
to wave him a farewell, but he had already forgotten 
me. He was marking, in the bone-dry, cactus-dotted 
soil, the places where he was going to set out his orange- 
trees. Though our paths have not crossed again, I 
have always remembered him. Resolute, resourceful, 
optimistic, self-reliant, blessed with a sense of humour 
which jeers at obstacles and laughs discouragements 
away, with as fanatic a faith in the future of the land 
as has a Moslem in the Koranic paradise, he has typi- 
fied for me those pioneers who, by their indomitable 
courage and unyielding tenacity, are converting the 
arid deserts of the Southwest into a veritable garden 
of the Lord. 

Recently, after a lapse of little more than a decade, 
I passed that way again. So amazing were the changes 
which had taken place in that brief interim that, just 
as my optimist had prophesied, I needed a second 
introduction to the land. Where I had left a desert, 

68 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

arid, sun-baked, forbidding, I found fields where sleek 
cattle grazed knee-deep in alfalfa, and groves ablaze 
with golden fruit. Stretching away to the foot-hills 
were roads which would have done credit to John 
Macadam, and scattered along them at intervals were 
prosperous looking ranch-houses of cement or wood; 
there was a post-office and a trim row of stores, and a 
schoolhouse with a flag floating over it; straggling 
cottonwoods marked the courses of the irrigation 
streams and in the air was the cheerful sound of run- 
ning water. There were two things which had brought 
about this miracle — pluck and water. 

Nowhere has the white man fought a more cou- 
rageous fight or won a more brilHant victory than in 
Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and the 
level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade; 
and the enemy which he has conquered has been the 
most stubborn of all foes — the hostile forces of Nature. 
The story of how the white man, within the space of 
less than thirty years, penetrated and explored and 
mapped this almost unknown region; of how he car- 
ried law and order and justice into a section which 
had never had so much as a speaking acquaintance with 
any one of the three before; of how, realising the 
necessity for means of communication, he built high- 
ways of steel across this territory from east to west 
and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the 
savageness of the countenance which the desert turned 
upon him, he laughed, and rolled up his sleeves, and 
spat on his hands, and slashed the face of the desert 

69 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those 
canals and ditches with water brought from deep in 
the earth or high in the mountains; and of how, in the 
conquered and submissive soil, he replaced the aloe 
with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus with 
cotton, forms one of the most inspiring chapters in 
our history. It is one of the epics of civilisation, this 
reclamation of the Southwest, and its heroes are, 
thank God, Americans. 

Other desert regions have been redeemed by irri- 
gation; Egypt, for example, and Mesopotamia, and 
parts of the Sudan, but the peoples of all those regions 
lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm, 
metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with 
more energy than themselves to come along and do 
the work. But the Arizonians, mindful of the fact that 
God, the government, and Carnegie help those who 
help themselves, spent their days wielding pick and 
shovel and their evenings in writing letters to Wash- 
ington with toil-hardened hands. After a time the 
government was prodded into action and the great 
dams at Laguna and Roosevelt are the result. Then 
the people, organising themselves into co-operative 
leagues and water-users' associations, took up the work 
of reclamation where the government left off, and it 
is to these energetic, persevering men who have drilled 
wells and ploughed fields and dug ditches through 
the length and breadth of that great region which 
stretches from Yuma to Tucson that the metamor- 
phosis of Arizona is due. 

70 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona 
than about any other region on the continent. The 
reclamation phase of its development has been so 
emphasised and advertised that among most of those 
who have not seen it for themselves the impression 
exists that it is a flat, arid, sandy, treeless country, a 
small portion of which has, miraculously enough, 
proved amenable to irrigation. This impression has 
been confirmed by various writers who, sacrificing ac- 
curacy for a phrase, have dubbed Arizona "the Ameri- 
can Egypt," which, to one who is really familiar with 
the physical characteristics of the Nile country and 
the agricultural disabilities under which its people 
labour, seems a left-handed compliment at best. Egypt 
— barring the swamp-lands of the Delta and a fringe 
of cultivation along the Nile — is a country of sun- 
baked yellow sand, as arid, flat, and treeless as an ex- 
panse of asphalt pavement. Arizona is nothing of 
the sort. In its most arid regions there is a small 
growth of green even in the dry season, while after 
the rains the desert bursts into a brilliancy and diver- 
sity of bloom incredible to one who has not seen it. 
How many people who have not visited Arizona are 
aware that within the borders of this "desert State" 
is the largest pine forest in the United States — six 
thousand square miles in area? Egypt, on the other 
hand, is, with the exception of the date-palm, virtu- 
ally treeless. In Egypt there is not a hill worthy the 
name between Alexandria and Wady Haifa; Arizona 
has range after range of mountains which rise two 

71 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

miles and more into the air. Egypt is not a white man's 
land and never will be. Arizona will never be anything 
else. If it is necessary to drag in Egypt at all (save as 
concerns antiquities) then, for goodness sake, pay the 
Khedive's country a real compliment by calling it 
"the African Arizona." 

The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was 
the desert. An Arab would not call it desert at all; a 
Bedouin would never feel at home upon it. I had 
expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless, 
plantless, incapable of supporting anything — yellow as 
molten brass, sun-scorched, unrelenting. That is the 
desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia. The 
Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In 
the first place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish- 
grey; "driftwood" is probably the term which an 
interior decorator would use to describe its peculiarly 
soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has 
it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On 
the contrary, it is a more or less rolling country, corru- 
gated by buttes and mesas and unexpected outcrop- 
pings of rock and sometimes gashed by arroyos, its 
surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vege- 
tation so whimsical and fantastic in the forms it as- 
sumes that it looks for all the world like a prim New 
England garden gone violently insane. There is the 
cholla, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so inno- 
cent-looking at a distance, might deceive the stranger 
into supposing that it was a sort of wildcat cousin of 
the gentle pussy-willow; the towering sajuaro, often 

72 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance 
to those mammoth candelabra which flank the altars 
of Spanish cathedrals; the octopus-like ocatilla, whose 
slender, sinuous branches, tipped with scarlet blossoms, 
seem to be for ever groping for something which they 
cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not 
unlike a collection of green pincushions, abristle with 
pins and glued together at the edges; the sombre 
creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease- 
wood, the bright green paloverde. These, with the 
white blossoms of the yucca and the pink, orange, 
yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the cacti, the 
brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and 
violets and blues of the encircling mountains, the 
fleecy clouds drifting like great flocks of unshorn sheep 
across an ultramarine sky, combine to form a picture 
as far removed from the desert of our imagination as 
one could well conceive. Less picturesque than these 
colour effects, the portrayal of which would have taxed 
the genius of Whistler, but more interesting to the 
farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring 
up over the mesas after the summer rains (some of 
them being, indeed, extraordinarily independent of the 
rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage 
for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those 
California-bound tourists who gather their impressions 
of Arizona from the observation platform of a mail- 
train while streaking across the country at fifty miles 
an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its 
possibihties with a wave of the hand and the dictum: 

73 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"Nothing to it but sun, sand, and sage-brush." Were 
those same people to see New York City from the rear 
end of a train they would assert that it consisted of 
nothing but tenements and tunnels. It is easy to 
magnify the barrenness of an arid region, and, that 
being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people 
of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion) 
that they instruct their legislators to enact a law ban- 
ishing any one found guilty of applying the defamatory 
misnomer "desert" to any portion of the State. 

Though it were not well to take too literally the 
panegyrics of the soil and its potentialities which every 
board of trade and commercial club in the State print 
and distribute by the ton, there is no playing hide-and- 
seek with the fact that the soil of a very large part of 
Arizona is as versatile as it is productive. At the cele- 
bration with which the people of Yuma marked the 
completion of the Colorado River project, prizes were 
awarded for forty-three distinct products of the soil. 
To recount them would be to enumerate practically 
every fruit, vegetable, and cereal native to the tem- 
perate zone and many of those ordinarily found only in 
the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether excep- 
tional degree the climatic characteristics of them both. 
This not being a seedsman's catalogue, it is enough to 
say that the list began with alfalfa and ended with yams. 

Everything considered, I am inclined to think that 
the shortest road to agricultural prosperity lies through 
an Arizona alfalfa field, for this proliferous crop, whose 
fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame, possesses 
the admirable quality of making the land on which it 

74 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

is grown richer with each cutting. They told me some 
prodigious alfalfa yarns in Arizona, but, as each dis- 
trict goes its neighbour's record a few tons to the acre 
better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in 
certain parts of the State, as many as twelve crops of 
alfalfa have been cut in a year. I wonder what your 
Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if he can 
get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of Hfe 
in a land like this? 

Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona 
have been unwisely advertised as "frostless." This 
is not true, for there is no place within our borders 
which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true, how- 
ever, that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand 
a better chance of escaping the ravages of frost than 
those in any other part of the country. The fruit 
ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the Arizona 
growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and 
grapefruit on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in 
advance of their Californian competitors. 

Unless I am very much mistaken, two products 
hitherto regarded as alien to our soil — the Algerian 
date and Egyptian cotton — are bound to prove im- 
portant factors in the agricultural future of Arizona. 
There is no tree which produces so large a quantity of 
fruit and at the same time requires so little attention 
as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing, date- 
palm groves in North Africa, where the prices are very 
low, yielding from five to ten dollars a tree per annum. 
They are, as it were, the camels among trees, for they 
thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that any other 

75 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date- 
palm has long since passed the experimental stage in 
Arizona — the heavily laden groves, which any one who 
cares to take the trouble can see for himself at several 
places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular 
evidence of the success with which this toothsome 
fruit can be grown under American conditions. The 
other crop which has, I am convinced, a rosy future in 
Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less 
water than any crop grown under irrigation. The 
fibre of the Egyptian cotton being about three times 
the length of the ordinary American-grown staple, it 
can always find a profitable market among thread 
manufacturers when our Southern cotton frequently 
goes unharvested because prices are too low to pay for 
picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds 
of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United 
States each year. With the fertile soil, the warm, dry 
cHmate, and the water resources which are being so 
rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the 
traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look 
out of the window of his Pullman at a fleeting land- 
scape of fleecy white. 

"That isn't snow, is it, George?" he will ask the 
porter, and that grinning Ethiopian will answer: 

"No, suh, dat ain't snow — dat's 'Gyptian cotton." 

This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Cen- 
turies before the great Genoese navigator set foot on 
the beach of San Salvador, southern Arizona was the 

76 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled in 
agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals 
which they constructed, the ruins of which may still 
be seen, providing object-lessons for the engineers of 
to-day. It is peculiarly interesting to recall that when 
the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in Pal- 
estine, when the Byzantine Empire was at the height 
of its glory, when the Battle of Hastings had yet to be 
fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled in England, a 
remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this 
remote corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean 
that the inhabitants of this region dwelt in desert sky- 
scrapers four, five, perhaps even six stories in height, 
that they possessed an organised government, that 
they had evolved a practical co-operative system not 
unlike the water-users' associations of the Arizona of 
to-day, and that, by means of a system of dams, aque- 
ducts, and reservoirs — the remains of which may still 
be seen — they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no 
means inconsiderable region. So great became the 
agricultural prosperity of this early people that it 
excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north, 
who, in a series of forays probably extending over 
decades, at last succeeded in exterminating or driving 
out this agricultural population. Their many-storied 
dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which 
they constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again 
dried up for lack of water and returned in time to 
its original state, the habitat of the cactus and the 
mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake. 

77 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Centuries passed, during which migratory bands 
of Indians were the only visitors to this silent and 
deserted land. Then, trudging up from the Spanish 
settlements to the southward, came Brother Mar- 
cos de Niza in his sandals and woollen robe. He, the 
first white man to set foot in Arizona, after penetrat- 
ing as far northward as the Zuni towns, returned 
to Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, where 
he related what he had seen to one of the Spanish 
officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who 
promptly equipped an expedition and started north- 
ward on his own account. Followed by half a thousand 
Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred friendly Indians, 
and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound 
across the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the 
snow-clad mountains of Sonora, through rivers swollen 
into torrents by the spring rains, and so into Arizona, 
where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took 
possession of all this country in the name of his Most 
Catholic Majesty of Spain. This was in the year of 
grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still 
disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman 
the Magnificent was hammering at the gates of Buda- 
pest. By the beginning of the seventeenth century 
the country now comprising the State of Arizona was 
dotted with Spanish priests, who, in their missions of 
sun-dried bricks, devoted themselves to the dishearten- 
ing task of Christianising the Indians. In 1680, how- 
ever, came the great Indian revolt; the friars were 
slain upon their altars, their missions were ransacked 

78 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

and destroyed, and the work of civilisation which they 
had begun was set back a hundred years. 

The nineteenth century was approaching its 
quarter mark before the first American frontiersmen, 
pushing southward from the Missouri in quest of furs 
and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid 
succession the Mexican War, which resulted in the 
cession to the United States of New Mexico, which 
then included all that portion of Arizona lying north 
of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in CaHfornia, 
which, by drawing attention to the country south of 
the Gila as a desirable transcontinental railway route, 
resulted in its purchase under the terms of the Gadsden 
Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a Con- 
federate invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its 
organisation as a Territory of the Union. The early 
period of American rule was extremely unsettled; 
Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which 
composed the population — ^prospectors, cow-punchers, 
adventurers, gamblers, bandits, horse thieves — ^leading 
to one of the worst though one of the most picturesque 
periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th, 
191 2, the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the 
sisterhood of States, and George W. P. Hunt, its first 
elected governor, standing on the steps of the capitol, 
swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled 
crowd for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the 
staff and broke out into a flag with eight-and-forty 
stars. 

Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona 
79 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

is greater than that of Italy, there are only three 
communities in the State — Phoenix, Tucson, and Pres- 
cott — which by any stretch of the census taker's 
figures are entitled to be called cities. They are, how- 
ever, as far removed from the whoop-and-hurrah, let- 
her-go-Gallegher cow- towns which most outlanders 
associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive, 
and well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and 
dishevelled, militant suffragette. Phoenix, the capital, 
I had pictured as consisting of a broad and very dusty 
main street bordered by houses of adobe and unpainted 
wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded 
by wooden awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the rail- 
ings and with every other place a temple to the god- 
desses of Alcohol or Chance. I was — I admit it with 
shame — as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium 
of apology. As a matter of fact. Phoenix is as modern 
and up-to-the-minute as a girl just back from Paris. 
Its streets are paved so far into the country that you 
wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to 
hold out. Its leading hotels are as liberally bath- 
tubised as those of Broadway, and the head waiter in 
the Adams House cafe will hand you a menu which 
contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare 
d'Astrachan to fromage de Brie. Gambling is as un- 
fashionable as it is at Lake Mohonk, the municipal 
regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs 
as raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically 
prohibited, while the charge for a Uquor licence has been 
placed at such a prohibitive figure that gentlemen 

80 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

with dry throats are compelled to walk several blocks 
before they can find a place with swinging doors. 
Tucson, on the other hand, still retains many of its 
Mexican characteristics. It is a town of broad and 
sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many 
buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along 
its principal business thoroughfares being shaded by 
hospitable wooden awnings, which are a godsend to 
the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer. 
It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and, 
as the guide-book writers put it, will well repay a 
visit — ^provided the weather is not too hot and the 
visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently situated 
on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of 
an incredibly rich mining region — did you happen to 
know that Arizona is the greatest producer of copper 
in the world, its output exceeding that of Montana or 
Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I 
remember most distinctly is the "Stope" room in the 
Yavapai Club, an architectural conceit which pro- 
duces the effect of a stope, or gallery in a mine — fitting 
tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry 
which gives it being. 

Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fe, 
Prescott & Phoenix Railway, which is the only north- 
and-south line in the State, forming a link between the 
Santa Fe and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that 
you will tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs 
Junction, which is the station for Castle Hot Springs, 
which lie a score or so of miles beyond the sound of 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the locomotive's raucous shriek, in a canon of the 
Bradshaw Mountains. It is a dolce far niente spot — a 
peaceful backwater of the tumultuous stream of life. 
Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls of rock 
is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and 
dotted with palms and fig trees and innumerable va- 
rieties of cacti and clumps of giant cane. A mountain 
stream meanders through it, and on the hillside above 
the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and 
deep, cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the 
subtropic vegetation, vividly recall the dak-bungalows 
in the Indian hills, are three great pools screened by 
hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in 
mid-winter without having any preHminary shivers, as 
the temperature of the water ranges from 115 to 122 
degrees. 

When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an 
acquaintance with an old-time prospector who asserted 
that he was the original discoverer of the place. 

"It was nigh on forty year ago," he began, remi- 
niscently. "I'd been prospectin' up on the head- 
waters of the Verde. One day, while I was ridin' 
through the foot-hills west 0' here a war party of 
'Paches struck my trail, an' the fust thing I knowed 
the hull blamed bunch was after me lickety-split as 
fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was 
ridin' a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a 
rainstorm, and as she was middlin' fresh I reckoned I 
wouldn't have much trouble gettin' away from 'em, an' 
I wouldn't, neither, if I'd been tol'rable familiar with 

d>2 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

the country hereabouts. But I warn't; and by gum, 
friend, if I didn't ride plumb into this very caiion! 
Yes, sirree, that's just what I went an' done! Its 
walls rose up as steep an' smooth as the side of a house 
in front o' me an' to the right o' me an* to the left o' 
me — an' behind me were the Injuns, yellin' an' whoopin' 
like the red devils that they were. I seen that it was 
all over but the shoutin', for there warn't no possible 
chanct to escape — not one!" 

"And what happened to you?" interrupted an 
excited listener. 

"What happened to me?" was the withering an- 
swer. "Hell, what could happen? They killed me, 
damn 'em; they killed me!" 

From a cHmatic standpoint Arizona is really a 
tropic country modified in the north by its elevation. 
It has no summer or winter in the generally accepted 
sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and 
August and a dry one the rest of the year. In the 
spring and faU dust-storms are frequent — and if you 
have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you 
have something to be thankful for — while in the sum- 
mer it gets so hot that I have seen them cover the sky- 
light of the Hotel Adams in Phoenix with canvas and 
keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to 
sundown. The warmest part of the State, and, in 
fact, the warmest place north of the lowlands of the 
Isthmus — ^barring Death Valley — is the valley of the 
lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where 

83 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the mercury in a shaded thermometer not infrequently 
climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said, however, 
that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evapora- 
tion from moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high 
temperatures of southern Arizona are decidedly less 
oppressive than much lower temperatures in a humid 
atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the 
all-pervading sunshine, Arizona has in recent years 
come to be looked upon as a great natural sanitarium, 
and to it flock thousands of sufferers from catarrhal 
and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, how- 
ever, I do not believe that Arizona is by any means an 
ideal sick-man's country; for, particularly in advanced 
stages of tuberculosis, there is always the danger of 
overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the cham- 
pagne-like quality of the air, feeling well before he is 
well and overexerting himself in consequence. 

Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was 
never put to a severer test than it was a few years 
ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then at the height 
of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity 
afforded by changing engines at Yuma to address a 
few remarks to the assembled citizens of the place 
from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma, as 
I have already remarked, has the reputation of being 
the red-hottest spot north of Panama, and its residents 
are correspondingly touchy when any illusion is made 
to the torridness of their chmate. Imagine their feel- 
ings, then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his re- 
marks, dragged in the bewhiskered story of the soldier 

84 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

who died at Fort Yuma from a combination of sun- 
stroke and delirium tremens. The following night his 
bunkie received a spirit message from the departed. 
"Dear Bill," it ran, "please send down my blankets." 
Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I have heard 
it told in the officers' mess at Aden, and at Bahrein 
at the head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of 
the club in Zanzibar, with its locale laid in each of 
those places, and I haven't the least doubt in the 
world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses 
when it was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabi- 
tants of Yuma, with a politeness truly Chesterfieldian, 
not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr. 
Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but 
it is said that one or two of them even laughed hoarsely. 
The Arizonian heat is not of the sunstroke variety, 
however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it 
all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this, 
remember, is only in the desert half of the State — the 
mountain half is as high and cool as you could wish, 
with snow-capped mountains and green grass and 
running water and fish and game everywhere. 

Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still 
offer opportunities aplenty for the sportsman who 
knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In the foot- 
hills of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost 
as common as are backyard cats in Brooklyn. Pa- 
tience, perseverance, and a pack of well-trained "b'ar 
dogs" rarely fail to provide the hunter with an oppor- 
tunity to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a 

8S 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

cinnamon on the MogoUon Plateau. Spotted leopards, 
or jaguars, frequently make their way into the south- 
ern counties from Mexico and serve to furnish hand- 
some rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though 
small herds of antelope are still occasionally seen, the 
law has stepped in at the eleventh hour and fifty- 
ninth minute and prevented their complete extermi- 
nation. But if you want an experience to relate over 
the coffee and cigars that will make your friends' 
stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose 
hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as 
woodchuck shooting on the farm, why don't you run 
down to that portion of Arizona lying along the Mexi- 
can border and hunt wild camels? I'm perfectly seri- 
ous — there are wild camels there. They came about in 
this fashion: Along in the late seventies, if I am not 
mistaken, the Department of Agriculture, thinking to 
confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers 
of the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head 
of camels from Egypt, arguing that if they could carry 
heavy burdens over great stretches of waterless and 
pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why 
they could not do the same thing in Arizona, where 
almost identically the same conditions prevailed. But 
the paternaHstic officials in Washington failed to take 
into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the 
camel is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite 
different from the patient and uncomplaining burro, 
but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it were, 
make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition 

86 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

and get along with him accordingly. Not so the 
Arizona packer. He took a hearty dislike to the ship 
of the desert from the first and never let pass an op- 
portunity to do it harm. As a result of this hostility 
and abuse, many of the poor beasts died and the re- 
mainder were finally turned loose in the desert to 
shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied 
they at least have not decreased and are still to be 
found in those uninhabited stretches of desert which 
lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not protected 
by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to 
require some hunting; so if you want to add to your 
collection of trophies a head that, as a cowboy acquain- 
tance of mine put it, is really "rayshayshay," you can't 
do better than to go into the desert and bag a drome- 
dary. 

In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind 
that the State consists of two distinct regions, as dis- 
similar in chmate and physiography as Florida and 
Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and 
plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine 
and palm. If you will take a pencil and ruler and draw 
a line diagonally across the map of the State, from 
Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexi- 
can border, you will have a rough idea of the extent 
of these two zones. That portion of the State lying to 
the north of this imaginary line is a six-thousand-foot- 
high plateau, mountainous and heavily forested, with 
green grass and running water and cold, dry winters, 

87 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

and an annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty 
inches. To the south of this quartering Hne Hes a tre- 
mendous stretch of arid but fertile land, broken at 
intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse 
vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly 
in the vicinity of the Colorado, often does not exceed 
three inches. It is in this southern portion, however, 
that the future of Arizona lies, for the success of the 
great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and 
which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant 
future by similar undertakings on the Santa Cruz, 
the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde, the Little 
Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing 
proof that all that its arid soil requires is water to trans- 
form it into a land of farms and orchards and gardens, 
in which the energetic man of modest means — and it 
is such men who form the backbone of every country — 
can find a generous living and a delightful home. 

A grave injustice has been done to the people of 
the State by those fiction writers who have depicted 
Arizona society as consisting of cow-punchers, faro 
dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist 
in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of 
saloons and poker palaces running at full blast, of 
stage-coaches and mail-trains held up and robbed, are 
as much out of date, if the reading public only knew it, 
as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter 
of fact, Arizona claims the most law-abiding popula- 
tion in the United States, and the claim is copper- 
riveted by the criminal records. The gambler and the 

88 




THE TRAIL OF A THOUSAND THRILLS. 

The road from Phoenix to the Roosevelt Dam—" its right angle corners and hairpin turns are 
calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently pompadour." 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force 
of public disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that 
picturesque body of constabulary which policed the 
country in territorial days, have been disbanded be- 
cause there is no longer work for them to do. While 
it is not to be denied that a large number of the citi- 
zens, particularly in the range country, still carry 
firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is winked 
at or that murder is regarded with a whit more toler- 
ance than it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals 
of Arizona are famous as "go-gitters" and a very 
large proportion of the gentry whom they have gone 
for and gotten are promptly given free board and 
lodging in a large stone building at Florence, on the 
outer walls of which men pace up and down with 
Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State 
Penitentiary at Florence is one of the most modern 
and humanely conducted penal institutions in the 
United States, being under the direct supervision of 
Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates 
of prison reform in the country. When I visited the 
penitentiary with the governor, instead of spending the 
night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on 
occupying a cell in "murderer's row." His experiment 
in introducing the honour system in the Arizona pris- 
ons has met with such pronounced success that roads 
and bridges are now being constructed throughout the 
State by gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed 
wardens. In this connection they tell an amusing 
story of an EngHsh tourist who was getting his first 

89 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

view of Arizona from the observation platform of a 
Pullman. As the train tore westward his attention was 
attracted by the conspicuous suits worn by a force of 
men engaged in building a bridge. 

"I say," he inquired, screwing a monocle into his 
eye and addressing himself to the Irish brakeman, 
"who are the johnnies in the striped clothing?" 

"Thim's som uv Guv'nor Hunt's pets from th* 
Sthate prison," was the answer. "Most av thim's 
murtherers too." 

"My word!" exclaimed the Briton, staring the 
harder. "Isn't it jolly dangerous to have murderers 
running loose about the country like that? What?" 

"Not at all," the brakeman answered carelessly; 
"yez see, sorr, in most cases there was exterminating 
circumstances." 

The other day, when the promoters of Phoenix's 
annual carnival wished to obtain a stage-coach to use 
in the street pageants, they could not find one in the 
State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture 
concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from 
Phoenix to Globe, driven by a gentleman who chews 
tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat, but it has 
sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in 
which the driver takes the giddy turns — he assured 
me that he went round them on two wheels so as to 
save rubber — is calculated to make the passengers' 
hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back 
country, where the roads run out and the trails begin, 

90 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

the cow-puncher is still to be found, but he, like the 
longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before 
civilisation's implacable advance. 

The history of Arizona divides itself into three 
epochs — the aboriginal, the exploratory, and the re- 
clamatory, or, if you prefer, the Indian, the Spanish, 
and the American — and each of these epochs is typi- 
fied by a remarkable and wholly characteristic struc- 
ture: the ruins of Casa Grande, the Mission of San 
Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa Grande 
— "the Great House" — or Chichi tilaca, to give it its 
Aztec name, which rises from the desert some sixty 
miles southeast of Phoenix, is the most remarkable 
plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of 
its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house 
of sun-dried puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean 
walls, its low doorways so designed that any enemy 
would have to enter on hands and knees, and its laby- 
rinth of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking 
and significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a 
ruin when discovered, in 1694, by the Jesuit Father 
Kino, how old it is or who built it even the archaeolo- 
gists have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins 
are emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of 
grain and breeders of cattle, whose energy and resource 
wrested this region from the desert, and who were 
driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more 
warlike people. 

In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa 
91 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Rita Mountains sweep down to meet the desert half a 
dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the white Mission 
of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that 
chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the 
Spanish orders stretched across Arizona in their cam- 
paign of proselytism three centuries ago. I saw it for 
the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved fagade 
rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes 
and towers and minarets silhouetted against the pur- 
ple of the mountains as though carved from ivory. 
Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as, swinging 
sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes 
upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and 
lovely between the desert and the sky, but I shall 
always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, 
and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most 
beautiful buildings I have ever seen. If California had 
that mission she would advertise and exploit it to the 
skies, but they don't seem to pay much attention to it 
in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with 
other and more important things. In fact, I had to 
inquire of three people in the hotel at Tucson before I 
could learn just where it was. Although the patter of 
monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased 
these many years, San Xavier is neither deserted nor 
run down, for the sonorous phrases of the mass are still 
heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling nuns 
conduct a school for Indian children within the pre- 
cincts of its white-walled cloisters, and at twilight 

the angelus-bell still booms its brazen summons and 

92 



CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 

the red men from the adjacent reservation come troop- 
ing in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona 
missions, it stands as a fitting memorial to the cou- 
rageous padres who first brought Christianity to Ari- 
zona, many of them at the cost of their lives. 

Eighty miles north of Phoenix, at the back of the 
Superstition Mountains and almost under the shadow 
of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt Dam — the 
last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Ari- 
zona's history. Those who know whereof they speak 
have estimated that four fifths of the State is fitted, so 
far as the potentialities of the soil is concerned, for 
agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has re- 
duced the available area to that which lay within the 
capabilities of the somewhat meagre streams to irri- 
gate. This was particularly true of the region of which 
Phoenix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men 
who proceeded to perform a modern version of the 
miracle of Moses, for, behold, they smote the rock and 
where there had been no water before there was now 
water and to spare. Across a narrow canon in the 
mountains they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone 
and cement to hold in check and to conserve for use in 
the dry season the waters of the river which swirled 
through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square 
miles in area, thus created, holds water enough to 
cover more than a million and a quarter acres with a 
foot of water and assures a permanent supply to the 
two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the 
project. The farmers of the Salt River valley, which 

93 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

comprises the territory under irrigation, forming 
themselves into an association, entered into a contract 
with the government to repay the cost of the dam in 
ten years, whereupon it will become the property of 
the landowners themselves; the water, under the terms 
of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the land. 
Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a 
reminder of a race long since dead and gone, and as 
the white mission at Tucson is a memorial to the 
Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam 
at Roosevelt, together with its accompanying pros- 
perity, a monument to the courage, daring, and re- 
source of the American. It is a very wonderful work 
that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the 
toil-hardened, sun-tanned men who are doing it I am 
proud to raise my hat. Such men are pioneers of 
progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping 
a path for you and me, my friends, "to To-morrow 
from the land of Yesterday." 



94 



IV 
THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 



''It lies where God hath spread it, 

In the gladness of His eyes, 
Like a flame of jewelled tapestry 

Beneath His shining skies; 
With the green of woven meadows, 

And the hills in golden chains. 
The light of leaping rivers, 

And the flash of poppied plains. 

Sun and dews that kiss it, 

Balmy winds that blow. 
The stars in clustered diadems 

Upon its peaks of snow; 
The mighty mountains o'er it. 

Below, the white seas swirled — • 
Just California stretching down 

The middle of the world." 



IV 

THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

BECAUSE it is at the very bottom of the map and 
almost athwart the imaginary line which separates 
the Land of Mariana from the Land of Do-It-Now, 
the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a 
journey through southern California. The term 
"southern CaHfornia," let me add, is usually applied 
to that portion of the State lying south of the Teha- 
chapis, which would probably form the boundary in 
the event of California splitting into two States — an 
event which is by no means as unlikely as most out- 
siders suppose. No romance of the West — and that is 
where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, 
magazine, book, and film, come from — excels that of 
the Imperial Valley. These half a million sun-scorched 
acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, 
midway between San Diego and Yuma, have proven 
themselves successors of the gold-fields as producers 
of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave of 
Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the 
Imperial Valley is that if you tell the truth you will be 
accused of being a booster. But, to paraphrase Davy 
Crockett: "Be sure your facts are right, then go 
ahead." And I am sure of my facts. You may believe 
them or not, just as you please. 

Not much more than a decade ago two brothers, 
97 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

freighting across the Colorado Desert from Yuma to 
San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human skeletons, 
white-bleached, upon the sand — grim tokens of a 
prospecting party which had perished from thirst. 
To-day the Colorado Desert is no more. Almost on 
the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a 
city has risen — a city with cement sidewalks and 
asphalted streets and electric lights and concrete 
office-buildings and an Elks' Hall and moving-picture 
houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed 
an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the 
main business thoroughfare, "to prevent congestion 
of traffic," as a local paper explained in breaking the 
news to the farmers. About the time that we changed 
the date-hnes on our business stationery from 189- to 
190- this was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking 
a region as you could have found between the oceans — 
and I'm not specifying which oceans either. Even the 
coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their 
last will and testament before venturing to cross it. 
In 1902 the United States Department of Agriculture 
sent one of its soil experts — at least he was called an 
expert — to this region to investigate its agricultural 
possibiHties. Here is what he reported: "Aside from 
the alkali, which renders part of the soil practically 
worthless, some of the land is so rough from gullies or 
sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it is greater 
than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and 
eight thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand- 
dunes or rough land. . . . The remainder of the level 

98 




How Mr. and Mrs. Powell saw Arizona. 




'One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the 
desert and the sky." 



SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA. 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

land contains too much alkali to be safe, except for 
resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thou- 
sand acres have already been taken up by prospective 
settlers, many of whom talk of planting crops which 
it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They must 
early find that it is useless to attempt their growth." 
If the sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure 
advice, the Imperial would still be a waste of sun- 
swept sand. But pioneers are not made that way. 
Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away 
after reading the report of the government expert, 
they merely grinned confidently and went on clearing 
the sage-brush from their land — ^for sixty miles to the 
eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, 
the Colorado River, with its wealth of water, rolled 
down to the sea. And water was all that was needed 
to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards 
and gardens. The government curtly declining to 
lend its aid, the settlers went ahead and brought the 
water in themselves. It took determination and per- 
spiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across 
those threescore miles of burning desert, but by the 
end of 1902 the work was done, the valley was intro- 
duced to its first drink of water, and the first crops were 
begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven 
hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irri- 
gated land in the world. In 1900 the government was 
offering land there for a dollar and a quarter an acre. 
In 1 9 14 land was selling {selling, mind you, not merely 
being offered) for just a thousand times that sum. 

99 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the 
most fertile and versatile in the world. Its one hundred 
and twenty-five thousand acres of alfalfa yield twelve 
crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three 
acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the 
year round. Later on another proud and prosperous 
husbandman showed me some land which had pro- 
duced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the 
acre. Early in February the valley growers begin to 
export fresh asparagus; their shipments cease in April, 
when districts farther north begin to produce, and 
start again in the fall when asparagus has once more 
become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are 
being picked at Christmas; grapes are sent out by the 
carload in early June, six weeks before they ripen else- 
where save under glass. The valley is famous for its 
cantaloups, which are protected during their early 
growth by paper drinking cups. It would seem, 
indeed, as though Nature was trying to recompense 
the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier 
years by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. 
A restricted region in the northeastern part of the 
valley is the only spot in the New World in which the 
Deglet Noor date — a variety so jealously guarded by 
the Arabs that few samples of it have ever been smug- 
gled out of the remote Saharan oases of which it is a 
native — matures and can be commercially grown. 

Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the 
Imperial Valley was wedded to the Colorado River. 
From that union have sprung five towns which are 

lOO 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

now large enough to wear long pants — Imperial, El 
Centro, Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley — while several 
other communities are in the knickerbocker stage of 
development. Though scarcely a decade separates 
them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier 
towns about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden 
shacks and corrugated-iron huts so characteristic of 
most new Western towns are wholly lacking in their 
business districts. The buildings are for the most part 
of concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; 
every building is designed to harmonise with its neigh- 
bours on either side; every building has its portales, or 
porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk, thus providing pe- 
destrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for, 
though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the 
fact that there is practically no humidity, they forget 
to add that in summer the air is like a blast from an 
open furnace door. 

When I was in the valley I dined with a friend 
one night on the terrace of the very beautiful country 
club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast a rosy 
glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table 
and all about us were similar tables at which sat sun- 
tanned, prosperous-looking men in white flannels and 
women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals slipped 
to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily 
coloured ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkHng in 
them. When the coffee had been set beside us we 
lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great content- 
ment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit coun- 

lOI 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

tryside. Amid the dark patches of alfalfa and the 
shadow-dappled plots which I knew to be truck-gar- 
dens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, 
whose leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, 
gleamed the cheerful Hghts of many bungalows. 

"A dozen years ago," said my host impressively, 
"that country out there was a howHng wilderness. 
Its only products were cactus and sage-brush. Its only 
inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. 
The man who ventured into it carried his Hfe in his 
hands. Look at it now — one of the garden spots of 
the world! It's one of God's own miracles, isn't it?" 

And I agreed with him that it was. 

From El Centro to San Diego is something over 
a hundred miles, but until very recently it might as 
well have been three hundred, so far as freight or 
passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, 
that being the approximate distance by the roundabout 
railway route. Though a railway is now in course of 
construction which will eventually give the valley towns 
direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the 
enterprising merchants of the latter city had no in- 
tention of waiting for the completion of the railway to 
get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of 
a million dollars and with that money they proceeded 
to build a highway into the Imperial Valley. Over 
that highway, which is as good as any one would ask 
to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor- 
trucks, bearing seeds and harness and farming im- 

I02 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

plements and phonographs and pianos and brass 
beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches, 
and poultry and early fruit and grain from those 
ranches back to San Diego. That illustrates the sort 
of people that the San Diegans are. It is almost un- 
necessary to add that the road has already paid for 
itself with interest. 

To understand the peculiar geography of San 
Diego, and of its joyous little sister Coronado, you 
must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour contain- 
ing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will 
find anywhere outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the 
gently sloping hillsides which form the bottom of the 
U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined, flower- 
banked boulevards which make San Diego look like 
one of those imaginary cities which scene-painters are 
so fond of painting for back-drops of comic operas. 
The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to the rocky 
headland known as Point Loma, where Madame 
Tingley and her disciples of the Universal Brotherhood 
theosophise under domes of violet glass; and in the 
very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle 
of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy 
surface has been lawned and flower-bedded and 
landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of the world, 
is Coronado. 

Coronado isn't really an island, you understand, 
for it is connected with the mainland by a sandy 
shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that even 
a duffer could drive a golf -ball across it. There is noth- 

103 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

ing quite like Coronado anywhere. It may convey 
something to you if I say that it is a combination of 
Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. 
It is one of those places where, unless you have on a 
Panama hat and white shoes and flannel trousers (in 
the case of ladies I don't insist on the trousers, of 
course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of 
the picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. 
There are miles of curving, asphalted parkways, bor- 
dered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down on 
the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with 
roses clambering over them, and near-Tudor mansions 
of beam and plaster, and the most beautiful villas of 
white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if 
they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the 
Lake of Como. Over near the shore is the Polo Club, 
which does not confine its activities to polo, as its 
name would imply, but, Hke the Sporting Club of 
Cairo, caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and 
the racing enthusiast as well. Every afternoon during 
the polo season tout le monde goes pouring out to the 
Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on 
street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and 
swagger about in the saddling paddock and cheer 
themselves hoarse when eight young gentlemen in 
vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, 
and hailing from London or New York or San Fran- 
cisco or Honolulu or Calgary, as the case may be, go 
streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust and 
colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is 

104 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

all over and the colours of the winning team have been 
hoisted to the top of the flagstaff and the losers have 
drunk the health of the victors from a Gargantuan 
loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great 
hostelry, whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables 
rising above the palm groves form a picture which is 
almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves, black, 
fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic 
evening sky. 

There are certain hotels which, because of the sur- 
passing beauty of their situation or their historic or 
literary associations or the traditions connected with 
them, have come to be looked upon as institutions, 
rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of 
every traveller to see, just as he should see Les In- 
vaHdes and the Pantheon and the Alcazar, and, if 
his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I put 
Shepheard's in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, 
the Danieli in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord 
Warden at Dover, the Mount Nelson at Cape Town, 
Raffles' s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New 
York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del 
Monte at Monterey, and the Hotel del Coronado. It 
is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor is it par- 
ticularly up-to-date, and from an architectural stand- 
point it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with 
the other famous hotels I have mentioned that in- 
definable something called "atmosphere" and it stands 
at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist 
travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant 

105 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

scene for which its great lobby is the stage you will 
have to go to the east coast of Florida or Egypt or the 
Riviera. From New Year's to Easter its spacious 
corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more 
interesting types of people than any place I know save 
only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit down for a few 
minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. 
There are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns 
bespeak the Rue de la Paix as unmistakably as though 
you could read their labels, and other women whose 
gowns are just as immistakably the products of dress- 
makers in Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre 
Haute. There are well-groomed young men, well- 
groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; 
men bearing famous names and men whose names are 
notorious rather than famous. There are big-game 
hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adven- 
turers, explorers, novehsts, mine owners, bankers, land- 
owners who reckon their acres by the million, and 
cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens of 
thousands. There are EngHsh earls, and French mar- 
quises, and German counts; there are women of 
Society, of society, and of near-society; men and women 
whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have 
made as famihar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and 
Mr. Gillette, and, mingHng with all the rest, plain, 
every-day folk haiUng from pretty much everywhere 
between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and 
whose money it is, when all is said and done, which 
makes this sort of thing possible. They come here 

io6 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they 
are never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers 
when the people beyond the Sierras are shivering before 
their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as regularly 
as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies 
madly along the yellow beach in the early morning; 
they fish off the coast for tuna and jewfish and bar- 
racuda; they take launches across the bay to see the 
flying men sw^oop and circle above the army aviation 
school; they watch the submarines dive and gambol 
like giant porpoises in the placid waters of the har- 
bour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept ve- 
randas or poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; 
and after dinner they tango and hesitate and one-step 
in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts up its in- 
struments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no 
one ever lets business interfere with pleasure. If you 
want to talk business you had better take the ferry- 
boat across the bay to San Diego. 

San Diego's history stretches back into the past 
for close on four hundred years. Her harbour was the 
first on all that devious coast-line which reaches from 
Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which 
a white man's anchor rumbled down and a white man's 
sails were furled. In her soil were planted the first 
vine and the first olive tree. The first cross was raised 
here, and the first church built, and beneath the palms 
which were planted by the padres in the valley that 
nestles just back of the hill on which the city sits the 
first lessons in Christianity were taught to the primi- 

107 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

tive people who inhabited this region when the pale- 
face came. Here began that remarkable chain of out- 
posts of the church which Father Junipero Serra and 
his indomitable Franciscans stretched northward to 
Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise 
began El Camino Real, the King's Highway, which 
linked together the one-and-twenty missions and which 
forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the 
world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, 
the most varied, and the most interesting. . 

I don't know the population of San Diego, because 
a census taken yesterday would be much too low to- 
morrow. The San Diegans claim that they arrive at 
the number of the city's inhabitants by the simple 
method of having the census enumerators meet the 
trains to count the people when they get off. For, as 
they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to 
San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry 
back home and pack his things. In a country where 
both population and property values have increased 
like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of 
with something akin to awe. In the year that Grant 
was elected President, a second-hand furniture dealer 
named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop in San 
Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime — some say 
two hundred and sixty dollars, some eight hundred — in 
a belt about his waist, took passage on a steamer down 
the Californian coast. With this money he bought, at 
twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San 
Diego. Some of those lots which the shrewd old 

io8 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

furniture dealer thus acquired could not now be bought 
for less than a cool half million ! Two decades later 
came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the mil- 
lions he had amassed in sugar, and gave to San Diego 
a street-railway, electric lights, a water-system, one of 
the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a 
solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of 
uniform height and harmonious design. 

The people of San Diego are adamantine in their 
conviction that theirs is a city of destiny. They assert 
that within a single decade the name of San Diego will 
be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of 
lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Cal- 
cutta or Marseilles. And they have some copper- 
riveted facts with which to back up their assertions. 
In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the 
harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, 
and protected from storms or a hostile fleet by a four- 
hundred-foot wall of rock. When the fortifications 
now in course of construction are completed San 
Diego will be as safe from attack by sea as though it 
were on the Erie Canal. Secondly, San Diego is the 
first American port of call for west-bound vessels pass- 
ing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, 
unless the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy mis- 
carry, it will become a great fortified coaling station 
and naval base, for it is within easy striking distance 
of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is 
the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of 
the Southwest, the grade between Houston and San 

109 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Diego, for example, being the lowest on the continent 
— and commerce follows the lines of least resistance. 
Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, 
doesn't it?), San Diego will soon have a rich and 
prosperous hinterland, without which all her other 
advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to 
draw from. Experts on agricultural development have 
assured me that the day is coming when the Imperial 
Valley, of which San Diego is already the recognised 
entrepot, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley 
of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary 
as it sounds, for the zone of cultivation in the Nile 
country is, remember, only a few miles wide. Beyond 
the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading 
orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the 
Yuma and Gila River projects. East of Yuma is the 
great region, of which Phoenix is the centre, which ac- 
quired prosperity almost in a single night from the 
Roosevelt Dam. East of Phoenix again the Casa 
Grande irrigation scheme is converting good-for- 
nothing desert into good-for-any thing loam. Beyond 
Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson 
Farms is redeeming a large area by means of its canals 
and ditches, while still farther eastward the titanic dam 
at Elephant Butte, which the government is building 
to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch 
from the clutches of the New Mexican desert a region 
as large as a New England State. And these are not 
paper projects, mind you. Some of them are com- 
pleted and in full swing; others are in course of con- 
no 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

struction, so that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of 
irrigated, cultivated, and highly productive land will 
stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the Rio 
Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, 
the settlers on these new lands will find San Diego 
nearer by from one hundred to two hundred miles than 
any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship 
their products and to do their shopping. But the peo- 
ple of San Diego are such notorious boosters that be- 
fore swallowing the things they told me I sprinkled 
them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn't really 
convinced of the genuineness of San Diego's prospects 
until I happened to meet one evening on a hotel terrace 
a member of America's greatest banking-house — a 
house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned 
that its support is a hall-mark of financial worth. 

"What do you think about this San Diego propo- 
sition?" I asked him carelessly, as we sat over our 
cigars. "Is it another Egyptian bubble which will 
shortly burst?" 

"That was what I thought it was when I came out 
here," he answered, "but since investigating conditions 
I have changed my mind. It looks so good to us, in 
fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by in- 
vesting several millions." 

So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San 
Diego's most valuable asset is her cHmate. Though 
the southernmost of our Pacific ports and in the same 
latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it 
has the most equable climate on the continent, the 

III 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

records of the United States Weather Bureau showing 
less than one hour a year when the mercury is above 
90 or below 32. According to these same official 
records, the sun shines on three himdred and fifty-six 
days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, so that 
rain is literally a nine days' wonder. San Diego's 
climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in 
winter, and, if you don't believe it, the San Diegans 
mil prove it by means of a temperature chart, zigzag- 
ging across which are two fines, one bright red, the other 
blue, which denote summer and winter climates cir- 
cling the globe and which converge at only one point 
on it — San Diego. As a result of these unique climatic 
conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has 
two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists 
have hardly taken their departure in the spring before 
the hotels and boarding-houses begin to fill up with 
people who have come here to escape the torrid heat 
of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer 
visitors are small ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, 
and Utah, and from across the fine in Chihuahua and 
Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would 
be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors 
there has sprung into being on the beach at Coronado 
a "tent city." The "tents" consist for the most part 
of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched 
roofs and walls and wooden floors and equipped with 
running water, sanitary arrangements, and cooking 
appHances. The Coronado Tent City contains nearly 
two thousand of these dwelfings which can be rented 

112 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

at absurdly low figures. For those who do not care to 
do their own cooking the management has provided 
a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals can 
be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion 
for the young people, a casino on whose verandas the 
mothers can gossip and sew and at the same time keep 
an eye on their children playing on the sand, and a 
club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the 
men. The place is kept scrupulously clean, it is thor- 
oughly policed, hoodlumism is not tolerated, and, 
everything considered, it seemed to me a most admi- 
rable and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer- 
vacation problem for people of modest means. 

Because I wanted to see something more than that 
narrow coastwise zone which comprises all that the 
average winter tourist ever sees of Cahfornia; because 
I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of the 
country and its people than comes from a car-window 
point of view; because I wanted to penetrate into 
those portions of the back country still undisturbed 
by the locomotive's raucous shriek and eat at quaint 
inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and 
where I pleased to converse with all manner of inter- 
esting people, I decided to do my travelling by motor- 
car. And so, on a winter's sunny morning, when the 
flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling 
roses at ten cents a bunch and the unfortunates who 
dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim were begging their 
janitors for goodness' sake to turn on more steam, I 

"3 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on 
her tail, and with a rush and roar we were off on a 
journey which was to end only at the borders of Alaska. 
As, with engines purring sweet music, the car breasted 
the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was 
almost taken away by the startling grandeur of the 
panorama which suddenly unrolled itself before us. 
At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple, 
mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like 
a map in bas-relief, lay the orchard-covered plains of 
California; to the left the Pacific heaved lazily be- 
neath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuya- 
macas swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before 
us the beckoning yellow road stretched away . . . 
away . . . away. 

I have never been able to resist the summons of 
the open road. I always want to find out what is at 
the other end. It goes somewhere, you see, and I 
always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, 
where it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears 
in the depths of a rock-walled canon or drops out of 
sight quite unexpectedly behind a hill, there is some- 
thing mysterious and magical waiting to be found. 
About the road there is something primitive and 
imperishable. Did it ever occur to you that it has 
been the greatest factor in the making of history, in 
the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress? 
Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direc- 
tion of human progress has always been determined 
by the roads of a people. For a time the marvel of 

114 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. 
The steamship sailed majestically away in contempt 
of the road upon the shore and the locomotive sounded 
its jeering screech at every crossing along its right 
of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the 
miracle of the motor-car has brought the road into 
its own again and started me ajourneying in the 
latest product of twentieth-century civilisation, with 
the strength of three-score horses beneath its throb- 
bing hood, up that historic highway which has been 
travelled in turn by Don Vasquez del Coronado and 
his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his 
sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first 
American to find his way across the ranges, by Fremont 
the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts, by Spanish caballe- 
ros and Mexican vaqueros and American pioneers, by 
priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants 
on the backs of patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts 
and white-topped prairie-schooners and six-horse Con- 
cord stages — and now by automobiles. In El Camino 
Real is epitomised the history and romance of the 
West. It is to western America what the Via Appia 
was to Rome, the Great North Road to England. 
It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of con- 
quest, a road of religion, a route to riches, a path of 
progress, a highway to happiness. He who can trav- 
erse it with no thought for anything save the number 
of miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts 
of the hotel ahead; who is so lacking in imagination 
that he cannot see the countless phantom shadows 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

who charge it with their unseen presence; who is in- 
capable of appreciating that in it are all the panorama 
and procession of the West, had much better stay at 
home. The only thing that such a person would un- 
derstand would be a danger-signal or a traffic police- 
man's club. 

I am convinced that if the several thousand 
Americans who go on annual motor trips through 
Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring 
them on the other side, could only be made to realise 
that on the edge of the Western ocean they can find 
roads as smooth and well built as the English high- 
ways or the routes nationales of France, and mountains 
as high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the 
Pyrenees, and scenery more varied and lovely than is 
to be found between Christiania and Capri, and vege- 
tation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on 
the Cote d'Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable 
climate than anywhere else on the globe, they would 
come pouring out in such numbers that there wouldn't 
be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the 
legislature of California voted eighteen millions of 
dollars for the improvement of the roads, and that great 
sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction 
with the appropriations made by the other coast states 
that by early in 191 5 a motorist can start from the 
Mexican border and drive northward to Vancouver — a 
distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to 
Constantinople — with as good a road as any one could 

ask for beneath his tires all the way. 

116 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

It is very close to one hundred and forty miles 
from San Diego to Riverside if you take the route 
which passes the rambling, red-tiled, adobe ranch- 
house famous as the home of Ramona; dips down into 
Mission Valley, where from behind its screen of palms 
and eucalyptus peers the crumbling and dilapidated 
fagade of the first of the CaHfornian missions; swirls 
through La JoUa with its enchanted ocean caverns; 
climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the 
live-oak groves behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment 
at Oceanside for a farewell look at the lazy turquoise 
sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission 
San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the 
Lake of Elsinore. That is the route that we took and, 
though it is not the shortest, it is incomparably the 
most beautiful and the most interesting. We found 
by experience that one hundred and forty miles is 
about as long a day's run as one can make with com- 
fort and still permit of ample time for meals and for 
leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. 
Once, in the French Midi, I motored with a friend 
who had chartered a car by the month with the agree- 
ment that he was to be permitted to run four hundred 
kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinat- 
ing or historically interesting was the region we were 
traversing, we must needs tear through it as though 
the devil were at our wheels. We couldn't stop any- 
where, my host explained, because if we did he wouldn't 
be able to get the full allowance of mileage to which he 
was entitled. Some day, however, I'm going through 

117 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

that same country again and see the things I missed. 
Next time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With 
highways as smooth as the promenade-deck of an 
ocean h'ner it is a temptation to burn up the road, of 
course, particularly if your car has plenty of power 
and your driver knows how to keep his wits about 
him. But that sort of thing, especially in a country 
which has so many sights worth seeing as CaHfornia, 
smacks altogether too much of those impossible per- 
sons who boast of having "done" the Louvre or the 
Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring, to my 
way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and 
where you please — and stopping. 

Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs 
the coast as though it were a long-lost brother. It is 
wide and smooth and for long stretches led through 
acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the 
vivid blue of the sea on one side and the emerald green 
of the wooded hillsides on the other, made the country 
we were traversing resemble the flag of some Central 
American republic. I think that the most beautiful 
of the little coast towns through which the road winds 
is Del Mar, perched high on a cypress-covered hill 
looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the 
Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. 
In the springtime the mesas above the sea are all 
aflame with yellow dahlias and the hillsides at the back 
are as gay with wild flowers as a woman's Easter bonnet. 
Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation 
of a down-and-out town. A few years ago it was Httle 

ii8 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

more than a straggling, grass-grown street lined with 
decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A far-sighted cor- 
poration discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, 
bought it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour 
drives and a golf course, and built a little gem of a 
hostehy, modelled and named after the inn at Strat- 
ford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the 
place is awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot 
its ten-mile crescent of silver sand; artists pitch their 
easels beneath the shadow of the friendly live-oaks; on 
the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the 
villas and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther 
up the coast you can lunch beneath the vine-hung 
pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor 
does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that 
the hills behind, grey-green with olive groves, are those 
of Amalfi and that the lazy, sun-kissed sea below you 
is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific. 

Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale 
between low hills, stands all that is left of the Mission 
of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as its name de- 
notes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. 
Begun when Washington was President of the United 
States and Alta California was still a province of New 
Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was 
but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican 
authorities after the expulsion of the Spaniards in 
1834, the historic mission has once again passed into 
the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and 
is now a training-school for priests who wish to carry 

119 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the cross into foreign lands. The ruins of the mission — 
which, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the priest 
in charge, are being restored to a semblance of their 
original condition as fast as he is able to raise the 
money — are among the most picturesque in California. 
We stopped there on a golden afternoon, when the 
sunHght, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches 
of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance 
upon the crumbling, weather-worn fagade and filtered 
through the arches of those cloistered corridors where 
the cowled and cassocked brethren of Saint Francis were 
wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling 
their beads and muttering their prayers. 

Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles 
northeast of San Luis Rey, over a road which is com- 
paratively little travelled and only indifferently smooth, 
is the asistencia or mission chapel of San Antonio de 
Pala. Even though it were not on the road to River- 
side, it would be well worth going out of one's way to 
see because of its picturesque campanario, with a 
cactus sprouting from its top, and the adjacent Indian 
village with its curious burial-ground. The little town, 
which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, 
and the trader's, stands on the banks of the San Luis 
Rey River, with high mountains rising abruptly all 
around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided by a paternal 
government and brought bodily from the East and set 
up in this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the 
Palatingwa tribe — a living refutation of our boast 
that we have given a square deal to the Indian. Once 

120 



THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 

each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends 
of neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain 
valley resounds to the barbaric clamour of the tom- 
toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants which were 
heard in this land before the pale-face came. The 
mission chapel, after standing empty for many years, 
once more has a priest, and at sunset the bell in the 
ancient campanile sends its mellow summons booming 
across the surrounding olive groves and the copper- 
coloured villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre 
Serra's time, come trooping in for evening prayer. 

But of all the California missions, from San Diego 
in the south to Sonoma in the north, the one I like the 
best is the Mission Miller at Riverside — and any one 
who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly agree 
with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the 
Mission Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere 
else in the world. At least I, who am tolerably familiar 
with the hotels of five-score countries, know of none. 
In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as he loves to 
be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance 
to an extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, 
to have taken the cent from sentiment. In other 
words, he has built a great hotel which combines the 
architectural features of the most interesting of the 
Californian missions — cloisters, patios, quadrangles, 
brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-cov- 
ered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming macaws 
screeching in them — with an Old World atmosphere 
and charm, and in such a setting he dispenses the same 

121 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

genial and personal hospitality which was a charac- 
teristic of the Spanish padres in the days when the 
travellers along El Camino Real depended on the 
missions for food and shelter. 



122 



V 
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 



'Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow? 
Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?" 



V 

WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

IT WAS in the heyday of the Second Empire. The 
French army was at its autumn manoeuvres and the 
country round about Rheims was aswarm with troopers 
in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. 
Louis Napoleon was directing the operations in person. 
Riding one day through a vineyard at the head of a 
brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and turned 
in his saddle. 

"Halt!" he ordered. "Column right into line! 
Attention! Present . . . arms!" 

"But who are you saluting, sire?" inquired one 
of his generals in astonishment, spurring alongside. 

"The grapes, mon general J ^ replied the Emperor; 
"for do they not represent the wealth and prosperity 
of France?" 

It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange 
belt which brought the incident to mind. For an 
entire morning we had been motoring among the 
orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an 
emerald sea. The endless orchards whose shiny-leaved 
trees drooped under their burden of pumpkin-coloured 
fruit; the chalk- white villas and the blossom- 
smothered bungalows of which we caught fleeting 

125 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

glimpses between the ordered rows; the oiled roads, 
so smooth and level that no child could look on them 
without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars 
standing at almost every door-step — all these things 
spelled prosperity in capital letters. 

"It seems to me," I remarked to the gentleman 
who was acting as our guide (these same orange groves 
had made him a millionaire in less than a decade), 
"that it would not be unbefitting if the people of 
Riverside followed the example of Louis Napoleon 
when he saluted the grapes"; and I told him the story 
of the Emperor in the vineyard. 

"You are quite right," said he. "Would you 
mind stopping the car?" and, standing in the tonneau 
very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat. 

"My Lady Citrona," he said gravely, "I have the 
honour to salute you, for it is to you that the prosperity 
of southern California is chiefly due." 

What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its 
climate has done for Santa Barbara, its oranges have 
done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you could not 
have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest 
community per caput — which is the Latin for inhabi- 
tant — ^between the ice-floes of the Arctic and the Gatun 
Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet — the 
gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green 
volume which tells you whether the people you meet are 
worth ciiltivating — says, and he ought to know what 
he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any 

126 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

"show-places" such as are proudly pointed out to the 
open-mouthed tourist in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, 
it is a pleasant place in which to dwell, is this happy, 
sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It 
is as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as 
spick and span as a ward in a hospital; it is as satis- 
fying as a certified cheque — and, incidentally, it is as 
dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded with 
suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for 
alcohol for a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only 
place I know that has foiled the exaggeratory ten- 
dencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges 
are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its 
poinsettias so flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains 
so snowily white, its skies so bright a blue that the post- 
card artists have had to be truthful in spite of them- 
selves. 

I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised 
by two great wrought-iron baskets which flank the 
entrance to the dining-room of its famous hostelry, the 
Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the 
other with flowers. And you are expected to help your- 
self; not merely to take one as a souvenir, you under- 
stand, but to fill your pockets, fill your arms. "That's 
what they're there for," the Master of the Inn will tell 
you. That little touch does more than anything else 
to make you feel that southern California reaUy is a 
land of fruit and flowers and that they are not hidden 
behind the garden walls of the rich but can be enjoyed 

by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the un- 

127 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

favourable impression a stranger receives in a certain 
ornate hotel in Los Angeles where he is charged forty- 
cents for a sliced orange ! 

Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored 
up a zigzag boulevard, with many horseshoe bends 
and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount Rubidoux, 
a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette 
within the city Hmits. Moses and his footsore Israel- 
ites, looking down upon the Promised Land, could 
have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted 
us on that winter's Sunday morning. I doubt if there 
has been anything more peacefully enchanting than a 
Sunday morning in southern California in the orange 
season since a "To Let" sign was nailed to the gates 
of the Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any 
way resembling, such a number of things: a stained- 
glass window in a church, for example; an Easter 
wedding; Italy in the springtime . . . but perhaps 
you don't grasp just what I mean. 

From Rubidoux's rocky base the furrowed orange 

groves, looking exactly Uke quilted comforters of 

bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until they meet 

just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be 

before the water came, and the desert sweeps up to 

meet tawny foot-hills, and the foot-hills blend into 

amethystine mountain ranges and these rise into snowy 

peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. 

And from the orange groves rises that same subtle, 

intoxicating fragrance (for you know, no doubt, that 

orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at the same time) 

128 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

that you get when the organist strikes up the march 
from "Lohengrin" and the bride floats up the aisle. 
The significant thing about it all, however, is not the 
surpassing beauty and extraordinary luxuriance of the 
vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation 
here at all. No longer ago than when women wore 
bustles this region was a second cousin to the Sahara, 
dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a country 
pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the 
faith, patience, energy, and courage of a handful of 
horticulturists, has been transformed into a land which 
is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a 
fruit-store window. 

Once each year, toward the close of the fasting 
month of Ramazan, the Arabs of the Sahara make a pil- 
grimage to a spot in the desert near Biskra, in southern 
Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come — 
by horse and by camel and on the backs of asses — for 
the sake of a prayer in the yellow desert at break of 
day. This "Great Prayer," as it is called, is one of 
the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever wit- 
nessed, and I little thought that I should ever see its 
like again — certainly not in my own land and among 
my own people. Once each year the people of River- 
side and the surrounding country also make a pil- 
grimage. They set out in the darkness of early Easter 
morning, afoot, ahorseback, in carriages, and in 
panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of 
Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They 

129 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

group themselves, fittingly enough, about the cross 
which has been erected in memory of Padre Junipero 
Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought Chris- 
tianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary 
journeys between the missions which he founded, not 
infrequently spread his blankets for the night at the 
foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand 
people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross 
to greet the Easter morn. As sunrise approached, a 
group of girls from the Indian School, standing on a 
rocky eminence, sang "He Is Risen," and then, as a 
red glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, 
the sweet, clear notes of a cornet rang out upon the 
morning air in the splendid bars of "The Holy City." 
Just as the last notes died away a spark of light — 
brighter than the arc-lamps which still glared in the 
streets of the city below — appeared above the San 
Bernardino's topmost rim and a moment later the 
full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, 
turning the purple mountains into peaks of glowing 
amethyst and the sombre vaUeys into emerald islands 
swimming in a sea of lavender haze. "Lord, Thou 
hast been my dweUing-place in all generations ... I 
will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh 
my help," chanted the people in solemn unison. And 
then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Nor- 
folk jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth 
boulder for a pulpit, read his "God of the Open Air." 
With the Amen of the benediction there ended the 
most significant and impressive service that I have 

130 




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WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

ever heard under the open sky and one which sharply 
refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking 
in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque obser- 
vances which make Europe so attractive to the trav- 
eller. 

It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, 
provided you go via Redlands, Smiley Heights, and 
San Bernardino, and it is flowers and fruit-trees all 
the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be 
directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange 
belt asks to be shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner 
was a hotel proprietor of national fame who amassed 
a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at 
Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the dis- 
cipline of the Methodist Church, among the rules which 
the guests are required to observe being one which 
states that "visitors are not expected to arrive or 
depart on the Sabbath." Smiley Heights is a remark- 
able object-lesson in the horticultural miracles which 
can be performed in California with water and patience. 
When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone- 
dry mesa, whose entire six hundred acres did not have 
sufficient vegetation to support a goat, but which, by 
the lavish use of water, and fertilisers, and the employ- 
ment of a small army of landscape architects and 
gardeners, has been transformed into a beauty-spot 
which is worth using several gallons of gasoline to see. 
In Cafion's Crest, to give the place the name bestowed 
by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern 
California, for on every side of this semitropic garden 

131 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

of pines, palms, peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, 
acacias, bamboos, deodars, and roses, roses, roses, 
stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which it 
was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care 
and water, it would quickly return. If you will look 
from the right-hand window of your north-bound train, 
just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for your- 
self: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising 
abruptly from an arid plain. 

I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoy- 
ment from the signs along the way as I do. The no- 
tices along the Californian roads struck me as being 
more original and amusing than any that I had ever 
seen. Most of them were worded with an after-you- 
my-dear-Alphonse politeness which made acquiescence 
with their courteous requests a pleasure, though occa- 
sionally we were confronted with a warning couched 
in such threatening terms that it seemed to shake a 
metaphorical fist in our faces. Who, I ask you, would 
not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in the face 
of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads 
between Riverside and Pasadena: "Speed Hmit thirty 
miles an hour — a reasonable compliance with this 
request will be deeply appreciated"? Another time, 
however, as we were humming along one of those 
stretches of oiled dehght which make the speedometer 
needle flutter like a lover's heart, we were greeted, as 
we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or 
Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced 
us in staring black letters with the threat: "Fifty dol- 

132 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

lars fine for exceeding the speed limit." As a result we 
crept through the town as sedately as though we were 
following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect 
the city fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the 
limits of the municipaUty our resentment was dispelled 
by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of the departing 
motorist. It read: "So long, friend! Come again." 

There is one word that you should never, never 
mention in the orange belt and that is — frost. That 
severe frosts are few and far between is perfectly true, 
as is attested by the fact that the road from Riverside 
to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure- 
bearing trees. That there is another and less joyous 
side to the business of raising breakfast-table fruit 
was brought sharply home to me, however, by noting 
that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, 
yes, thousands, of little cyHndrical oil-stoves — the 
kind that they use in New England farmhouses to 
heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on Sunday 
mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles 
flashes to the orange-growing centres a warning of an 
impending frost, the countryside turns out en masse as 
though to repel an invader, and soon the groves are 
dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchard- 
ists wage their desperate battle with the cold, with 
stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and bonfires for their 
weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes 
which does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as 
in 1913, that they are infrequent is best proved by the 
fact that automobile, phonograph, and encyclopedia 

^23 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

salesmen find their most profitable markets in the 
orange belt. 

The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so sys- 
tematised of recent years that nowadays, if one is to 
beHeve the alluringly worded prospectuses issued by 
the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the 
owner of an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking- 
chair on his veranda, watch his trees grow and his 
fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and marketed by 
proxy, and pocket the money which comes roUing in. 
According to the specious arguments of the realty 
dealers, it is as simple as taking candy from children. 
You simply can't lose. According to them, it works 
out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel 
Nutt, principal of a school at Skaneateles, N. Y., decides 
that when his teaching days are over he would like 
to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove 
under CaUfornia's sunny skies. Lured by the glowing 
advertisements, he invests in ten acres of land planted 
to young trees and piped for water. The price is five 
hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth 
down and the balance in four annual instalments. 
By the time that his grove is old enough to bear, 
therefore, it will be fully paid for. In its fifth year 
— according to the dealer, at least — Mr. Nutt's grove 
will yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars 
an acre, so that it will pay for itself the very first year 
after it comes into bearing. Moreover, during the five 
years that must of necessity intervene before the 
trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop, 

134 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

there is no real necessity for Mr. Nutt's coming to 
California, for, by the payment of a purely nominal 
sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated, and 
cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists 
while he continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters 
their three R's. As soon as the grove comes into 
bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send in 
his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, 
buy a ticket to California, and settle down as an orange 
grower with an assured income of five thousand dollars 
a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred dollars, 
you see) for life. Simple, isn't it ? But let us suppose, 
just for the sake of argument, that about the time 
that Prof. Nutt's trees come into bearing a devastating 
frost comes along and in a single night wipes his orchard 
out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the 
financial strain of setting out another grove and irri- 
gating it and fertiUsing it and caring for it for another 
five years ? All of which goes to prove that orange grow- 
ing is no business for people of limited means. Like 
speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which 
should only be followed by those who have sufiicient 
resources to tide them over serious reverses and long 
periods of waiting. For such as those, however, there 
is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees. 

Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has 
been greatly simplified of late by the organisation of 
growers' unions. These unions are a result of the 
long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged 
to oust the intrenched middlemen and speculators. 

^35 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

A few years ago the growers found themselves facing 
the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy. They 
chose the former. The first to organise were the 
Riverside growers, who built a common packing-house, 
put a general manager in charge, and sent their fruit 
to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So 
successful did the experiment prove that other districts 
soon followed Riverside's example, until to-day there 
is no orange-growing section in the State that does 
not have its own packing-house. But the growers did 
not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to 
get the top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some 
system must be devised for getting market quotations 
at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and then 
diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here 
is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands 
might arrive in the Milwaukee freight yards the same 
day as a car-load from San Bernardino, in which case 
the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint 
Paul there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. 
To meet this necessity the local packing-houses grouped 
themselves together in shipping exchanges, of which 
there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred and 
thirty, handling sixty per cent of California's citrus 
crop. But, as the industry grew, still another organisa- 
tion was needed : a big central fruit exchange to handle 
problems of transportation, to gather information about 
the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal, 
technical, and scientific information. Thus there came 
into being the big central exchange, as a result of 

136 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

wliich the growers have been enabled to market their 
own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central 
exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important 
market in the country. No commissions and no 
dividends are paid; there is no profit feature what- 
soever. Against each box of fruit passing through 
the exchange is assessed the exact expense of handling, 
and the entire proceeds, less only this expense, are 
remitted to the grower. The local packing-house 
unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the dis- 
trict unions exist solely to handle the local problems 
of the association; the central union exists for the 
purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and 
other information. Each of these unions is duly in- 
corporated and has a board of directors, the growers 
electing the directors of the district union and these 
in turn electing the directors of the central union. 
Each union is a pure democracy — one vote a man, 
independent of his financial status or his acreage. 

Few outsiders appreciate the enormous propor- 
tions to which California's citrus industry has grown. 
Three of every four oranges grown in the United 
States come from Californian groves, which yield a 
fifth of the entire citrus production of the world. The 
orange and lemon groves of California now amount to 
approximately a quarter of a million acres and are 
increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres 
a year, for, as it takes a grove five years to come into 
bearing and nine years to reach maturity, population 
multiplies faster than the groves can grow. Not- 

137 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

withstanding this formidable array of facts and figures, 
it is open to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a 
safe investment for a person of modest means. Though 
a great deal of money has unquestionably been made in 
citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is 
a good deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most 
successful growers in CaHfornia, a pioneer in the in- 
dustry, said to me not long ago: "If the best friend I 
have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand 
dollars and asked me to invest it for him in citrus 
property, I would send it back to him unless I knew that 
there was plenty of money where that came from. I 
have made money in orange growing, it is true, but 
only because there has never been a time that I have not 
had ample resources to fall back on." And here is 
the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch one 
day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow 
whose husband had died a few years before, leaving 
her with two small children and twenty acres of oranges. 

"These twenty acres," she told me, as we sat on 
the terrace over the coffee, "pay for the maintenance 
of this house, for the education of my two youngsters, 
for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my 
annual trips back East. And I don't have to econo- 
mise by wearing cotton stockings, either." 

I have shown you both sides of the orange question; 
you can decide it for yourself. 

Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination 
that worked overtime has asserted that Pasadena 

138 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

means "the Pass to Eden." Though this is, to say the 
least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, 
a peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot 
on earth where Adam and Eve would feel more at 
home than in the enchanting region of oak-studded 
foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasa- 
dena is the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone 
and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is to America: a 
place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can 
idle away their winters amid the same luxurious sur- 
roundings and under the same cielo sereno that they 
would find on the Cote d'Azur. Enclosed on three 
sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it 
from the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its 
subtropical gardens on the level floor of the San Ga- 
briel Valley, ten miles from La Puebla de Nuestra 
Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, to give the second city 
of California its full name. It is said, by the way, 
that the people of Los Angeles have twenty-three 
distinct ways of pronouncing the name of their city. 
Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised 
authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure 
a correct and uniform pronunciation of the city's 
name by distributing among his friends the following: 

" My Lady would remind you, please, 
Her name is not * Lost Angy Lees ' 
Nor Angy anything whatever. 
She trusts her friend will be so clever 
To share her fit historic pride, 
The g should not be jellified; 
Long o, g hard and rhyme with *yes' 
And all about Los Angeles." 

139 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It 
is as methodically laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; 
it is as immaculate as a new pair of white kid gloves. 
At the height of the season, which begins immediately 
after New York's tin-horn-and-champagne debauch 
on New- Year's Eve and lasts until Fifth Avenue is 
ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find more private 
cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more 
high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at 
any pleasure resort in the world. It is much frequented 
by the less spectacular class of millionaires, to whom 
the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not appeal, 
and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the 
Hotel Green enough men whose names are household 
words to form a quorum of the board of directors of 
the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure, Pasa- 
dena has an extraordinary number of large and beauti- 
ful churches, and, as their pulpits are frequently oc- 
cupied by divines of international reputation, they 
are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have 
counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked 
in front of two fashionable churches in Colorado Street. 

Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is 
invariably shown three "sights" — Chinatown, Golden 
Gate Park, and the CHff House, so, when he goes to 
Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken 
through the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount 
Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a mile-long, hundred- 
foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its 
entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats. 

140 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

We drove along it quite slowly, taking a resident with 
us to point out the houses and retail any odds and ends 
of gossip about the people who lived in them, like the 
lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as 
interesting as reading the advertising pages in the 
magazines, for most of the names he mentioned were 
familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds of times on 
soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and 
safety-razors. Then we motored over to the Busch 
Gardens, which were the hobby of the late St. Louis 
brewer and on which he lavished the profits of good- 
ness knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceed- 
ingly beautiful in spots, they are too much of a horti- 
cultural pousse-cafe to be wholly satisfying. Roses 
and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and 
geraniums and asters are exquisite by themselves, but 
they don't look particularly well crowded into the 
same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch Gar- 
dens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is 
characteristically Calif ornian; the sweeping green- 
sward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary live-oaks, 
recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped 
hedges and the jets cfeau suggest Versailles; the 
gravelled promenades, bordered by marble seats and 
rows of stately cypress, bear the unmistakable stamp 
of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes 
which are scattered about in the most unexpected 
places could have come from nowhere on earth save 
the Rhineland. 

The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up 
141 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Mount Lowe. You can no more escape it and preserve 
your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne and escape 
going up the Rigi. From Rubio Canon, near the city 
limits, a cable incHne which in Switzerland would be 
called a funicular, climbs up the mountainside at a 
perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you specu- 
late as to what would happen if the cable should break. 
When two thirds of the way to the summit the passen- 
gers are transferred to an electric car which, alternately 
clinging like a spider to the mountain's precipitous 
face or creeping across giddy canons by means of cob- 
web bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way 
upward to the Alpine Tavern, a mile above the level 
of the valley floor. The far-flung orange groves with 
the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasa- 
dena and Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid 
the live-oaks, the rounded, moleskin-coloured foot-hills 
splotched with yellow poppies, the double rows of 
blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue- 
gums) and the white highways which run between 
them, in the distance the towering sky-line of Los 
Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther still, 
the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, 
violet and alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine 
to form a picture the Great Artist has but rarely 
equalled. 

Different people, different tastes. Those who pre- 
fer the whoop-and-hurrah of popular seaside resorts can 
gratify their tastes to the limit at any one of the long 
and beautiful beaches — Long Beach, Redondo, Santa 

142 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

Monica, Venice — ^which adjoin Los Angeles, Here the 
amusements which await the visitor are Hmited only 
by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes 
along this coast of joy in summer beggar description. 
The splendid sands are alive with bathers; the prome- 
nades, Uned with all the peripatetic shows of a popular 
seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, josthng, 
happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is 
the rule rather than the exception at similar resorts in 
the East, and there is amazingly little vulgarity, the 
boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney 
Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt, 
to the fact that several of the beaches have "gone dry." 
At Long Beach the really beautiful Virginia, than which 
there are not half a dozen finer seaside hotels in the 
United States, provides accommodation for those who 
wish to combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach 
with the more sedate pleasures of Marblehead or 
Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck 
on the largest scenic railway in the world (they called 
them roller-coasters when I was a boy), or you can 
bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool in the 
world, or you can go down on the beach and disport 
yourself in the surf of the largest ocean in the world, 
though it is only fair to add that this last is not the 
exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica 
you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat 
fried sand-dabs — a fish for which this portion of the 
Californian littoral is famous and which is as delicious 
as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can 

143 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian 
extraction in white ducks and a red sash pilots you 
through a series of lagoons and canals, and, if you have 
a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able 
to make yourself believe that you are in the city 
of the Doges. Though somewhat noisy and nearly 
always crowded — which is, of course, precisely what 
their promoters want — the Los Angeles beaches pro- 
vide the cleanest amusements and the most whole- 
some atmosphere of any places of their kind that I 
know. 

Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea 
as the aeroplane flies, and considerably farther by the 
shortest railway route, the Angelenos have done their 
best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by 
attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San 
Pedro, twenty miles away, into a great artificial sea- 
port. Everything that money can do has been done. 
The national government has dredged and improved 
the harbour and built a huge breakwater at enormous 
cost, and Los Angeles, which has extended her munici- 
pal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent millions 
more in the construction of several miles of concrete 
quays and the installation of the most powerful and 
modern electric loading machinery. There is even 
under serious consideration a plan for digging a ship- 
canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing 
vessels can discharge and take on cargo in the heart 
of the commercial district. Though in time, as a result 
of the impetus provided by the completion of the 

144 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los 
Angeles, which now has a population of considerably 
over half a miUion (in 1890 it had only fifty thousand), 
San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port of consider- 
able importance for coastwise commerce, its limita- 
tions are not likely to permit of its ever becoming a 
dangerous rival of its great sister ports of San Fran- 
cisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San Fran- 
ciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to 
get a harbour of her own is amusingly illustrated by 
a story they tell upon the coast. When the big break- 
water was completed and San Pedro was ready to do 
business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with 
a banquet, among the guests of honour being a gentle- 
man prominent in the civic life of San Francisco. 
Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation 
and of fervid oratory on Los Angeles's dazzling future 
as one of the great seaports of the world, the San 
Franciscan was called upon to respond to a toast. 

"I have Hstened with the deepest interest, gen- 
tlemen," he began, ''to what the speakers of the eve- 
ning have had to say regarding your new harbour at 
San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling 
of regret that this magnificent harbour, which you 
have constructed at so great an expenditure of money 
and effort, is not more easy of access from your 
beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that 
you could overcome this unfortunate circumstance by 
laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to San Pedro. 
Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been 

145 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

blowing this evening, you would soon have the Pacific 
Ocean at your front door." 

Strung along the coast of California, from Point 
Loma to Point Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. 
Counting only the larger ones, they number twelve: 
three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in 
the Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, 
small as well as large, there are thirty-five distinct 
links in the island chain which stretches from wind- 
swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, 
Madeira, and the Canaries are to Europe, these en- 
chanted isles are to the Pacific Coast. They have 
the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer 
heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold 
winds which sweep down from the Maritime Alps. 
With their palms and semitropic verdure they have all 
the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a 
tropical climate, the winters having the crispness of 
an Eastern October and the summers being cooler 
than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of 
Nova Scotia. 

Southernmost of the chain and not more than 
ten miles southwest from San Diego as the sea-gull 
flies is the group of rockbound islets known as Los 
Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though unin- 
habited and extremely rough, they are surrounded by 
forests of kelp and form famous fishing grounds for the 
big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the 
northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is 

146 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

the group of which Santa Catalina is the largest and 
the most famous. Though Santa Catalina is only 
twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los 
Angeles, it takes the Cabrillo, owing to her tipsy 
gait and the choppy sea which generally prevails in 
the channel, nearly three hours to make the passage, 
which is as notorious for producing mal de mer as that 
across the Straits of Dover. 

The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Cata- 
lina during the Stone Age, and of whom many traces 
have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot 
the island, were first awakened to the fact that the 
world contained others than themselves when the 
Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped the anchors 
of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed 
away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his 
generals as a present. Some two hundred years were 
gathered into the past before Pio Pico, the Mexican 
governor of Alta California, sold the island for the price 
of a horse and saddle. In later years various other 
transfers took place from time to time, James Lick, 
who lies buried under his great telescope on Mount 
Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later 
it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an 
English syndicate, but the ore ran out and the dis- 
gusted Britishers were glad to dispose of it to the 
Banning Company, which is the present owner. 

Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven 
miles long, is shaped, with great appropriateness, like 
a fish, the smaller portion, which corresponds to the 

147 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

tail, being connected with the main body of the island 
by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all 
sides by a dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants, 
whose wonders visitors are able to view from glass- 
bottomed boats. The topography of the island is 
scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which sur- 
round it. From the mountain peaks which rise to a 
height of two thousand feet or more, V-shaped canons, 
their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet, 
sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the 
sea. On the southern slopes cactus and sage-brush, 
grim offspring of the desert, cling to the naked, sun- 
baked rocks; on the other, the cooler side, dense, 
growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder 
and other flowering shrubs form a striking contrast. 
Most of the vast acreage of the island is a sheep ranch 
and wild-goat range, but one canon at the eastern end is 
devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town 
of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight 
hundred, which in summer increases to that many 
thousand. Avalon is unlike any other place that I 
know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay 
at the mouth of a deep canon which almost bisects the 
island. At the upper end of this canon a great wall 
formed by a mountain ridge protects the town from 
ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest 
approach in the world to the "perfect climate." The 
quaint houses of the town, many of them of charming 
and distinctive design, cling to the rocky hillsides and 
dot the slopes of the canons, adapting themselves, with 

148 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and con- 
ditions. Along the water-front are the large hotels, a 
concert pavilion, and the aquarium — ^which, by the 
way, has a larger variety of marine animals than the 
famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is 
a large and handsome bath-house where hundreds 
bathe daily, and in the canon at the back of the town 
are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the 
tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor 
an extraordinary diversity of amusements, Avalon's 
raison d'etre is angling with rod and reel and everything 
is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters go to 
Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners 
of the world in quest of the big game of the sea. From 
the south side of the Bay of Avalon a long pier wades 
out into the water. Just as the bridge across the Arno 
in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths, 
so this pier is the resort of the professional tuna boat- 
men. Along it, on either side, are ranged their booths 
or stands, each with its elaborate display of the para- 
phernalia of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each 
booth bears the owner's name and his power-boat is 
anchored close by. At the end of the pier is a singular 
object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a 
locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great 
game-fish are hung and photographed, and on the 
scales all the fish taken in the tournaments are weighed 
by the official weighers of the Tuna Club. 

If you will glance to starboard as the Cabrillo 
steams slowly into Avalon Harbour, you will notice a 

149 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

modest, brown frame building, with a railed terrace 
dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water. 
This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution 
of its kind in the world. To become eligible to 
membership in this unique club one must take on a 
rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and 
with a line of not more than twenty-four threads, a 
fish weighing over one hundred pounds. If elected one 
receives the coveted blue button, which is the angler's 
Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many 
fishermen thousands of dollars and years of patience, 
while others have won it in a single day. The club 
holds organised tournaments throughout the fishing 
season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals 
of gold, silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore, 
sea-bass, yellowtail, and bonito caught by its members. 
I might mention, in passing, that the largest tuna ever 
taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P. 
Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the 
official scales the indicator registered two hundred and 
fifty-one pounds. I know of no more interesting way 
in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace 
of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay, 
and Ksten to the tales told by these veterans of rod 
and reel: of Judge Beaman, who hooked a tuna off 
Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to 
Redondo, a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood, 
who played a fish for seven hours before it could be 
brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional ele- 
phant and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and 

150 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

Zanzibar, and I give you my word that their stories 
were not a whit more fascinating than the tales of 
battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the 
terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon. 

Santa CataUna's nearest neighbour is San Cle- 
mente, twenty miles long, whose northern shore is a 
wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and on whose 
rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of 
sheep. A hundred miles or so to the northward are the 
islands composing the Santa Barbara group: Anacapa, 
Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast of 
Anacapa — "the ever-changing" — is a maze of strange 
caverns gnawed from the rock by the hungry sea, one 
of them, of vast size, having once served as a retreat 
for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along 
this coast, and now for sea-Hons and seals, a skipper 
from Santa Barbara doing a thriving business in cap- 
turing these animals and selHng them for exhibition 
purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by 
showmen all over the world because of their intelli- 
gence and wilUngness to learn. The island, which is arid 
and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact that there is 
little or no water on it apparently causing no discom- 
fort to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at 
night as a result of the dense fogs that by morning 
each animal is literally a walking sponge. 

Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the 
most interesting and attractive of the Channel Is- 
lands, being worthy of a visit if for no other reason 
than to see its painted caves, which have been worn 

151 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

by the waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed 
by the salts gorgeous and varied colors. Viewed from 
the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble of lofty 
hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed 
and scarred by caiions and gorges in all directions. 
But once you have crossed this rocky barrier which 
hems the island in, you find yourself in the loveliest 
Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with 
palms and oleanders and bananas growing everywhere 
and a climate as perfect and considerably milder than 
that of Avalon. The island is the property of the Caire 
estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and 
Italian labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch 
and in the vineyards which cover the interior of the 
island. When you set foot within the valley you leave 
America behind. The climate is that of southern 
France. The vineyard is a European vineyard. The 
brown-skinned folk who work in it speak the patois of 
the French or ItaHan peasantry. The ranch-houses, of 
plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balco- 
nies and their quaint and brilliant gardens, might have 
been transplanted bodily from Savoy, while the great 
flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the encircling 
hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old 
World instead of within a hundred miles of the newest 
metropoHs in the New. There are two distinct seasons 
at Santa Cruz — the sheep-shearing and the vintage — 
when the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by 
large numbers of Barbarenos, from Santa Barbara 
across the channel, who pick the grapes in September 

152 



WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 

and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the surface 
of the island is cut in every direction by canons, 
gulches, and precipices, the Barbareiio horsemen, who 
are descended from the old Mexican vaquero stock, 
mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up the 
sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and 
along the brinks of giddy chasms which an ordinary 
mortal would hesitate to negotiate with hobnailed 
boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair- 
raising exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and, 
should you ever happen to be along that coast at 
shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit 
from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to 
see it. 

Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to 
fishing, for there is excellent wild-goat shooting on 
Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting on Santa Cruz. 
Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended 
from domestic animals introduced by the early Span- 
iards, they have lived so long in a state of freedom that 
they provide genuinely exciting sport. These wild pigs 
are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man 
to meet, however, for they combine the staying quaU- 
ties of a Georgia razor-back with the ferocity of a 
Moroccan boar and will charge a man without the 
slightest hesitation. 

Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are, 
I believe, unique. Where else, pray, within a half 
day's sail of a city of six hundred thousand people, 
can one explore pirates' caves, pick bananas from 

153 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for 
the largest fish in existence, and, no matter what the 
season of the year, dwell in a dimate of perpetual 
spring? 



154 



VI 
THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 



" All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day, 
You and I together on the King's Highway. 
The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea; 
There's many a road to travel, but it's this road for me. 

It's a long road and sunny, it's a long road and old, 
And the brown padres made it for the flocks of the fold; 
They made it for the sandals of the sinner folk that trod 
From the fields in the open to the mission-house of God. 

We will take the road together through the morning's golden glow, 
And we'll dream of those who trod it in the mellowed long ago; 
We will stop at the Missions where the sleeping padres lay, 
And we'll bend a knee above them for their souls' sake to pray. 

We'll ride through the valleys where the blossom's on the tree, 
Through the orchards and the meadows with the bird and the bee. 
And we'll take the rising hills where the manzanitas grow, 
Past the grey tails of waterfalls where blue violets blow. 

Old conquistadores, O brown priests and all, 
Give us your ghosts for company when night begins to fall; 
There's many a road to travel, but it's this road to-day, 
With the breath of God above us on the King's Highway." 



VI 

THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

FOLLOWING the example of the late J. Caesar, 
Esquire, the well-known Roman politician, who 
districted Gaul into three parts, California might be 
divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras, 
the Sequoias, and the Sands. Though nowhere sepa- 
rated by a journey of more than a single day at most, 
these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical 
and climatical characteristics and in the recreations 
they offer to the visitor as the coast of Brittany is 
from the Engadine, as the Black Forest is from the 
Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike each 
other as the White Mountains are unHke Atlantic 
City, as Muskoka is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the 
confines of a region five hundred miles long and barely 
two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of 
cHmate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by 
all the resorts of eastern America and Europe put 
together. 

That California's summer climate is even more 
delightful than its winter climate is a fact which not 
one outlander in a hundred seems able to comprehend. 
Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter is 
equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer, 
your average Easterner, who has heard all his Hfe of 

157 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

California's winter climate, finds it impossible to dis- 
abuse himself of the conviction that a region which is 
so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the 
year must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intol- 
erable weather during the other half, so as to strike, 
as it were, an average. A climate which is equally 
inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond 
his comprehension. He fails to understand why 
Nature does not treat California as impartially as she 
does other regions, making her pay for balmy, cloud- 
less winter days with summers marked by scorching 
heat and torrential rains. Summer in California is 
really equivalent to an Eastern June. The nights are 
always cool, and the blankets, instead of being packed 
away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is 
no humidity and the air, which in most summer cli- 
mates is about as invigorating as lemonade, is as crisp 
and sparkHng as dry champagne. Nor is there any 
rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each 
August the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces 
its famous Grove Play in a natural amphitheatre formed 
by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian forest. 
The cost of the production runs into many thousands 
of dollars and involves many months of effort, but the 
preparations are made with the absolute assurance that 
the performance will be unmarred by rain. In a quarter 
of a century the club members have not been disturbed 
by so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor 
trip or a picnic or a fishing excursion during an Eastern 
summer only to be awakened on the morning of the 

158 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof ? That 
sort of thing doesn't happen in California any more 
than it does in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day, 
no matter whether it is a week or a month or a year 
ahead, and on that morning you will find the weather 
waiting for you at the front door. This absence of 
rain is not an entirely unmitigated blessing, however, 
for it means dust. And such dust ! I have never seen 
any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great Valley 
of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain. 
A jack-rabbit scurrying across the desert sends up a 
column of dust like an Indian signal-fire. Along the 
coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated to 
some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling 
in from the sea at dawn, leaving the countryside as 
fresh and sparkHng as though it had been sprinkled 
by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go, the 
heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey, 
they resemble the driving mists so characteristic of 
the Scottish highlands. For the benefit of golfers 
I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make pos- 
sible the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin 
at Monterey, the courses farther south, where there is 
but little moisture during the summer, being charac- 
terised by greens of oiled sand and fairways which 
during six months of the year are as dry and hard 
as a bone. Artists will tell you that the summer land- 
scapes of California are far more beautiful than its 
winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they 
are right, for in June the countryside, with its un- 

159 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

numbered nuances of green and purple, is transformed, 
as though by the wave of a magician's wand, into a 
dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes 
and yellows. 

California may best be described as a great walled 
garden with one side facing on the sea. It is separated 
from those unfortunate regions which lie at the back 
of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all the 
world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles 
high, is five hundred miles long, having Mount San 
Jacinto for its southern and Mount Shasta for its 
northern corner. At the back of the garden rises, 
peak on peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra 
Nevada. Gradually descending, the high peaks give 
way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills, the 
foot-hills run out in canons and grassy valleys, the 
valley slopes become clothed with forests, the forests 
merge into groves of gnarled, fantastic live-oaks, and 
these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which sweep down 
to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden — moun- 
tain, forest, and shore — is dotted with accommodations 
for the visitor which are adapted to all tastes and to 
all purses and which range all the way from huge 
caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix- 
les-Bains, of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented 
cities pitched beneath the whispering redwoods or 
beside the murmuring sea. 

Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its 
bluest, unless you have loitered beneath the palms 
which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, unless 

1 60 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless 
you have motored along the Corniche Road, with the 
sun-flecked Mediterranean on the one hand and the 
dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you can- 
not picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of 
this enchanted littoral. From Cannes, where the Medi- 
terranean Riviera properly begins, to San Remo, where 
it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of which 
is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling 
villages that you feel as though you were passing 
through a city, the impression being heightened by the 
gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by the 
admonitory notices which confront you at every turn. 
From Coronado, where the Californian Riviera begins, 
to the Golden Gate, where it ends, is six hundred miles, 
and every foot of that six hundred miles is through a 
veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date- 
palms and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze 
with golden fruit and these, in turn, merge into the 
grey-green of the olive; the olive groves change to 
orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these 
lose themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks, 
and the live-oaks turn to redwoods and the redwoods 
yield to pines. Bordering this historic coastal high- 
way — El Camino Real, it is still called — are vast 
ranchos whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks 
and herds; great estates, triumphs of the landscape- 
gardener's skill, with close-clipped hedges and velvet 
lawns from amid which rise Norman chateaux and 
Italian villas and Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint 

i6i 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

bungalows with deep, cool verandas, half hidden by- 
blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels — dozens and 
dozens of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of 
colour over stucco walls and cool terraces shaded by 
red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted coast, 
and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had 
seen too many of the world's beauty-spots to give my 
allegiance to any one of them, have — I admit it 
frankly — fallen victim to its spell. 

Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of 
the most flourishing agricultural regions in the State, 
the districts through which we sped on the wings of 
the winter morning being variously noted for their 
production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans. 
Ventura is the railroad brakeman's contraction of San 
Buenaventura — ^it is obvious that a trainman could 
not spare the time to enunciate so long a name — the 
picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its 
origin to the mission which the Franciscan padres 
founded here a year after the Battle of Yorktown and 
which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a 
detour of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting 
the Ojai Valley (it is pronounced "0-hi" if you please), 
a little place of surpassing beauty which not many 
people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland, 
or Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai 
strikes directly inland from the coast, following the 
devious course of the Matilija, climbing up and up 
and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain 

162 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

meadows carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly 
debouches into the valley itself. Because the Ojai 
is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so simple 
and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to 
give an accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount 
Topotopo, the highest of the peaks which hem it in, 
is not much over six thousand feet, it can best be 
compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such 
as Andermatt, for example, or the one below Grindel- 
wald. I do not particularly like the idea of continu- 
ally dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison 
for things American, but so many of our people have 
come to know Europe better than they do their own 
country that it is the only means I have of making 
them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with 
the coming of each summer, they habitually turn their 
backs. 

To visualise the Ojai you must imagine a boat- 
shaped valley, ten miles long perhaps and a fifth of 
that in width, entirely surrounded by a wall of purple 
mountains. The floor of the valley is covered with 
lush green grass and dotted with thousands of gnarled 
and hoary live-oaks with venerable grey beards of 
Spanish moss. Through the trees peep the shingled, 
weather-beaten cottages of Nordhoff, which, with its 
leafy lanes, its shady blacksmith shop, its cosy inn, 
and its collection of country stores with the inevitable 
group of loungers chewing tobacco and whittling and 
settling the affairs of the nation in the shade of 
their wooden awnings, is as quaint and sleepy and 

163 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

unspoiled a hamlet as you can find west of Cape 
Cod. The annual tournaments of the Ojai Valley 
Tennis Club, which for nearly twenty years have 
been held each spring on the pretty oak-fringed 
courts behind the inn, attract the crack players of the 
coast, and here have been developed no less than six 
national champions. As you ascend the mountain 
slopes the character of the vegetation abruptly changes, 
the oak groves giving way to orchards of orange, lemon, 
fig, and olive, which, taken in conjunction with the 
palms and the veritable riot of flowers, give to the sides 
of the valley an almost tropical appearance. The 
Ojai is said to have more varieties of birds and flowers 
than any place in the United States, and I think that 
the statement is doubtless true. It is like an aviary in a 
botanical garden. Snuggled away in the mountains at 
the back of the Ojai are two equally enchanting but 
much less frequented valleys: the Matilija and the 
Sespe — the latter accessible only on a sure-footed horse 
along a mountain trail which is precipitous in places 
and nowhere overwide. In the spring and summer 
the streams which tumble through these mountain 
valleys are aHve with trout jumping-hungry for the 
fly. If you can accommodate yourself to simple accom- 
modations and plain but wholesome fare you can eat 
and sleep and fish a very delightful vacation away at 
the rate of two dollars a day or ten a week. 

High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles 
almost hidden by the Gold of Ophir roses which clamber 
over it, is a little hotel called The Foot-hills. It is an 

164 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at 
most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what 
meals they set before you! Brook- trout which that 
very morning were leaping in the Matilija, hot bis- 
cuits with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs, 
grapefruit fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard, 
strawberries with lashings of thick yellow cream. I've 
never been able to decide which I like best about the 
Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better 
known and more people begin to go there, I suppose 
the same thing will happen to it which happened to a 
dear httle alhergo in Venice which I once knew and 
loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca, 
quite undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had 
sheltered the Brownings and Carlyle. It was a sure 
refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big hotels, 
and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of 
omelet and strawberries and Chianti served under a 
vine-clad pergola on the edge of the canal. The first 
time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were 
leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping: 

"I know a place where we will lunch. I haven't 
been there for years and I don't remember its name, 
but I think that I can find it," and I described it in 
detail to Angelo, our gondolier. 

"5*^', si, signor,^^ he assured me, and shoved off 
with his long oar. 

Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca 
without my being able to locate my beloved little 
hotel. 

165 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"This must have been the place you meant, 
signor," Angelo said finally, pointing to a building 
which was rapidly being demolished and to a staring 
sign which read: "A new five-story hotel with hot and 
cold running water, electric lights, and all modern con- 
veniences wiU shortly be erected on this site. Meals 
prixfixe or a la carte. Music every evening." 

And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my 
little hotel in the Ojai when the world comes to learn 
about it. So I beg you who read this not to mention 
it to any one. 

Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to 
Santa Barbara led over the Casitas Pass by a preci- 
pice-bordered road so narrow and dangerous that the 
fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the 
Casitas is a thing of the past, for a highway has been 
built along the edge of the sea by what is known as the 
Rincon route, several miles of it lying over wooden 
causeways not unHke the viaducts for Mr. Flagler's 
seagoing railway on the Florida keys. This portion 
of the coast is one long succession of barrancas, each 
with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter torrent at 
its bottom, so that the road builders had many obsta- 
cles with which to contend. It is a very beautiful 
highway, however, and reminds one at every turn of 
the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same 
lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated 
mountains on the other. Through Carpinteria we ran, 
pausing in our flight just long enough to take a look at 

i66 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference, 
which has borne in a single season, so its guardian 
assured us, upward of ten tons of grapes; through 
Summerland, where the forest of derricks and the reek 
of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past 
Miramar, as smothered in flowers as the heroine of 
d'Annunzio's play; through Montecito, with its marble 
villas and red-roofed mansions rising above the groves 
of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive, 
where the great rollers from the Pacific come booming 
in to break in iridescent splendour on the silver strand; 
and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport of the West, 
where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows 
with picturesque hovels of adobe. 

Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I 
suppose, than any place between the oceans. Drawn 
up beside the curb you will see a magnificent limousine, 
the very latest product of the automobile builder's 
art, with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its 
sloping hood and as luxuriously fitted as a lady's bou- 
doir; a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed, flannel-shirted, 
his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps, 
fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the 
mountains, will rein up his wiry mustang and dexter- 
ously roll a cigarette and ask the liveried chauffeur 
for a match — Muchas gracias, Senor. On State Street 
stands a huge concrete ofSce-building, the very last 
word in urban architecture, with hydraulic elevators 
and cork-paved corridors and up-to-the-minute venti- 
lating devices, and all the rest. A man can stand in 

167 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

front of that building and toss an orange into the patio 
of a long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls 
of crumbling adobe show that it dates from the period 
when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of 
Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings 
dating from the Spanish era left, the observing stranger 
will note that few if any of them retain their original 
roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Be- 
cause the old Spanish tiles will bring almost any price 
that is asked for them, being in great demand for 
roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of one 
Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles 
brought from the old cathedral at Panama. Nor have 
I the least doubt in the world that these plutocratic 
phihstines would strip the historic mission which is 
Santa Barbara's chief est asset of its tiles and bells and 
crosses if the monks could be induced to sell them. 

Over in the section known as the Old Town all 
the houses are Mexican in character, their walls tinted 
yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with the palm-trees 
and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the 
groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the 
gates, and the Spanish names — Garcias, Ortegas, 
Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras — which one sees 
everywhere, makes one reaUse that Santa Barbara is 
still Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to 
read the street names — Canon Perdido, Anapamu, 
Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala, Salsi- 
puedes — makes you feel that you are in some Castilian 
town and not in the United States of the twentieth 

i68 




'Even the imposing fagade of the Arlington, with its arches, cloisters, terraces, and 
campanarios, suggests a Spanish monastery." 




'A long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose pottery roof and walls of adobe show that it dates 
from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of Washington." 



SANTA BARBARA, A CITY OF CONTRASTS. 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

century at all. Why on earth, while they were about it, 
they didn't call the town's main thoroughfare La Calle 
del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to 
understand. This glaring inconsistency in nomen- 
clature is almost compensated for, however, by the 
little square down on the ocean front which is called 
the Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters, 
guarded by anxious nurses, gambol upon the sands; 
here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green 
benches and look out to sea and Usten to the music of 
La Monica's band; here lovers sit silently, clasping 
hands beneath the palms, just as other children, other 
old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old 
Spain. 

To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a 
place of residence, you should stroll down State Street 
on a winter's morning. Like Bellevue Avenue in New- 
port, it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths 
in tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the 
curbs chatting with pretty girls in rakish, vivid- 
coloured motor-cars. Dowagers descend from stately 
limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads 
and cotillion favours and the latest novels. Young 
men astride of mettlesome ponies trot by on their 
way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed 
men of years, who look as though they might be bank 
presidents and railway directors and financiers and 
probably are, pause to discuss the wretched weather 
prevaihng in the East and to thank their lucky stars 
that they are out of it and to challenge each other to 

169 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

a game of golf. Slim young girls in riding-boots and 
beautifully cut breeches patronise the soda-fountains 
and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore 
and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and 
tango teas. It is one big reception, at which every one 
knows every one else and every one else's business. 
Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in 
Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of in- 
formality, which makes it a pleasant contrast to Pasa- 
dena, which is so painfully conscious of its millionaires 
that life there possesses about as much informality 
as a court ball. 

The ancient mission, which with the climate is 
Santa Barbara's chief attraction, provides the motif 
for the city's architecture, and the citizens have made 
a very commendable effort to Hve up to it, or rather 
to build up to it, even the imposing facade of the Ar- 
lington, with its arches, cloisters, terraces and cam- 
panarios, suggesting a Spanish monastery far more 
than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks themselves, 
however, who have been the most flagrant offenders 
against the canons of architectural good taste, for 
within a stone's throw of their beautiful old mission 
they have erected a college which looks for all the 
world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and 
a cross. No matter from what point upon the encir- 
cling hills you look down upon the city, that atrocious 
college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the 
picture as a New England schoolmarm at a the dan- 
sant, comes up and hits you in the eye. 

170 




THE MISSION OF SANTA BARBARA. 

'The sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the ancient sycamores, 
cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling, weather-worn facade." 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

Perhaps you were not aware that about one out 
of every ten plays which flicker before your fascinated 
eyes on the motion-picture screen were taken in or 
near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the 
town is a moving-picture producer's paradise and 
several companies have built their studios there and 
make it their permanent headquarters. Within a 
five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in 
which can be enacted scenes laid anywhere between 
Cancer and Capricorn. There are sandy beaches which 
might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and 
buccaneering exploits and similar "water stuff"; there 
are Greek and Spanish villas hidden away in sub- 
tropical gardens which would provide backgrounds for 
anything from the "Odyssey" to "The Orchid-Hunter"; 
and back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where 
bands of cow-punchers, spectacularly garbed, pursue 
horse thieves or valorously defend wagon-trains at- 
tacked by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep 
within the focal radius of the camera. 

Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara 
which appeal to the imagination, I think that I liked 
best the miniature caravels which surmount the mas- 
sive gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To 
most visitors I suppose that they are only puppet 
vessels, quaintly rigged and strangely shaped, to be 
sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand for 
something very definite indeed, do those little carven 
craft. They represent the San Salvador and the Vit- 
toria, the little caravels in which Juan Rodrigues Ca- 

171 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

brillo, the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer who 
hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this 
storied coast upward of three centuries ago and whose 
anchors rumbled down off these very shores. From out 
the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and fairy-tale 
which beclouds the early history of Cahfornia, the 
certain and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese 
sailor of fortune stands out sharp and clear as the one 
fact upon which we can rely. Though he never returned 
from the land which he discovered, though he has been 
overlooked by History and forgotten by Fame, his 
adventure has become immortal, for he put California 
on the map. 

Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some 
point between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo 
and strike due eastward, you would find athwart your 
path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the 
cruelest and most forbidding of the earth's waste 
places — Death Valley. At the very back of Cahfornia, 
parallehng the eastern boundary of Inyo County, 
sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High 
Sierras and the burning sands of the Colorado Desert, 
this seventy-five-mile-long gash in the earth's surface 
— the floor of the valley is two himdred and ten feet 
below the level of the sea — is one of the most extraor- 
dinary regions in the world. It is a place of contrasts 
and contradictions. Though in summer it is probably 
the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold becomes 
so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its 

172 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

aridity is so extreme that men have died from lack of 
moisture with water at their lips. Though rain is 
virtually unknown, the Hves of the inhabitants are 
frequently menaced by the floods which result from 
cloudbursts. A mountain range, whose rocks are of 
such incredibly vivid colours that even a scene-painter 
would hesitate to depict them as they are, is called the 
Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were 
lost when the valley was christened, and though its 
history from that day to this has been one of hardship, 
peril, and death, with little to reHeve its harshness, for 
fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot 
as any on the continent. During the other half, how- 
ever, it is a sample package of that fire-and-brimstone 
hell of which the old-time preachers were wont to warn 
us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a 
man who was able to survive a summer in Death 
Valley. 

The valley first became known by the tragedy 
which gave it its name. The year following the dis- 
covery of gold in California a party of thirty emigrants, 
losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow 
metal, left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck 
south through this region in the hope of finding a short 
cut to the gold-fields. But they found a short cut 
to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley 
and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst. 
The valley, which runs almost due north and south, is 
about seventy-five miles long, and at its lowest point, 
where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight miles 

173 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

in width. To the west the Panamints reach their 
greatest altitude, while on the east the Funeral Range 
is practically one huge ridge, with almost a vertical 
precipice on the side next the valley. To the south 
another range, running east and west, shuts in the 
foot of the valley and turns it into a cul-de-sac. Seen 
from the summit of the Panamint Range, the valley 
looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked 
with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax 
deposits. Far to the north, gleaming in the sunlight 
like a slender blade of steel, is the Amargosa River, 
while on either side of the valley the ranges rear them- 
selves skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that 
beside them the walls of the Grand Canon would look 
cold and drab. The vegetation is scant, stunted, and 
unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly 
yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes; 
even the cactus, which flourishes on the inhospitable 
steppes of the adjacent Mohave Desert, has given up 
the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair. But, 
arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through 
it. One, the Amargosa, comes in at the north end, 
where it forms a wash that gives out volumes of sul- 
phuretted hydrogen which poisons the air for miles 
around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters 
are drinkable though hot. Everything considered, it 
is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death Valley. 

Weather Bureau ojEficials would tell you, should 
you ask them, that when there is ninety per cent of 
humidity in the air the weather is insufferably oppres- 

174 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

sive; that air with seventy per cent of humidity is about 
right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is 
overheated by a stove or furnace, will produce head- 
aches; while, should the percentage be reduced to 
thirty, or even forty, the air would become positively 
dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence 
must be like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the 
air, raised to furnace heat by its passage over the 
deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level until 
its percentage of moisture is less than one half of one 
per cent! Effects of this ultrararefied air are ob- 
served on every hand. Men employed in ditch digging 
on the borax company's ranch were compelled to sleep 
in the running water with their heads on stones to keep 
their faces above the surface — and this was not in the 
hottest weather, either. Furniture built elsewhere is 
quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into fantastic 
shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels 
incautiously left empty lose their hoops in an hour. 
Eggs are boiled hard in the sand. A handkerchief 
taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry 
more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove. 
One end of a blanket that is being washed will dry 
while the other is still in the tub. Meat killed at night 
and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine. 
A man cannot go without water for an hour without 
becoming insane. A thermometer, hung in the coolest 
place available, for forty-eight hours never dropped 
below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally 
climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand, 

175 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

atop his wagon. "He was that parched that his head 
cracked open over the top," said a man who saw the 
body. 

But in October, strange as it may seem, Death 
Valley becomes a dreamy, balmy, dolce far niente land, 
the home of the Indian summer. Later in the season 
snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of 
three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works 
the thermometer has registered 1 20 in the shade of the 
house in August and yet before the winter was over 
the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to 
50 below zero ! There is no place on earth, so far as 
I am aware, where so wide a variation has been re- 
corded. Though it rarely if ever rains in the valley, 
cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent moun- 
tain tops — usually in the hottest weather and when 
least expected — and in the face of the roaring floods 
which follow the people in the valley fly to the foot-hills 
for their lives. More appalling than the floods, how- 
ever, are the sand-storms which are a recognised 
feature of life (existence would be a better term) in 
Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that vale 
of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The 
wind shrieks by with the speed of an express train. 
A dense brown fog completely blots the landscape out. 
Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and 
sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the 
burning atmosphere like genii suddenly gone mad. 
The air is filled with flying pebbles, sand, and dust. It 

is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken vol- 

176 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

canic rock in place of snow. These sand-storms 
commonly last for three days; then they end as sud- 
denly as they began, leaving the desert swooning 
amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up 
spectral cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green 
fields as though by the sweep of a magician's wand. 
In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut are magni- 
fied into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately 
palms; a crow walking on the ground appears to be a 
man on horseback. 

The borax deposits for which the valley is famous 
are exactly alike in their general appearance: a bowl- 
shaped depression hemmed in by barren hills and at 
the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water 
or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the dis- 
tance, but which is really the boracic efHorescence on 
the bed of a dried-up lake. Walking out upon the 
marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking crust 
through which the feet generally break, clay or slime 
being found beneath. To reach the railway the borax 
has to be hauled half a hundred miles by wagon imder 
a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with 
wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches 
wide, each carrying ten tons. Two tremendous Per- 
cherons are harnessed to the pole and ahead of them, 
fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches 
from the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the 
driver from his lofty seat controlling his twenty ani- 
mals by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot 
jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assort- 

177 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

ment of objurgations. The next time, therefore, that 
you chance to see a package of borax, stop and think 
what it has cost — insufferable heat, bitter cold, sand- 
storms, agonizing thirst, sunstroke — yes, sometimes 
even death. 

From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glow- 
ing, ever luring, bids adios to the sea for a time and 
sweeps inland again through a land of oak groves and 
olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock, 
which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up 
behind it, bears so startling a resemblance to Andalusia 
that the homesick Spanish friars must have rubbed 
their eyes and wondered whether they were really in 
the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily 
upward under the shadow of giant oaks and sycamores, 
crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the Gaviota Pass 
(gaviota, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in 
the Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the 
monotone which is the motorist's lullaby, taking the 
long, steep grades like a hunted cat on the top of a 
back-yard fence. 

From the summit of the pass we dropped down the 
brush-clothed flanks of the mountains by a zigzag 
road into a secluded river valley whose peace and 
pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring 
grandeur of the Gaviota, as is the five-o'clock whistle 
to the workman after a busy day. By this same pass 
the trail of the padres ran when, a century ago, they 
walked between the missions, so that it was with pecu- 

178 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

liar appropriateness that there rose before us, as we 
swung around a shoulder of the mountain, the Mission 
of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming like ivory 
in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a 
splendid note of colour against the lush, green fields, 
its cross-surmounted campanile pointing heavenward, 
just as the fingers of its cassocked builders were wont 
to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of 
Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mis- 
sion, which was in a deplorable state of neglect when 
he came there a dozen years ago, has been reroofed 
and in a large measure restored, the south corridor, 
which runs the length of the convento^s front, where 
the brown-robed monks were wont to pace up and down 
in silent meditation, having been transformed into a 
sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with 
flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the 
old monastic days that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, 
who applies at the Mission Santa Ynez for food or 
shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that 
brought home to me most vividly the hardships en- 
dured by the cowled and sandalled founders of these 
missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk, bordered 
with faded blue, which caught my attention in the 
sacristy. 

"What was this umbrella used for, father?" I in- 
quired. 

"That, my son," said Padre Alejandro, "was used 
by the padres to shield themselves from the sun on 
their journeys between the missions, for they were not 

179 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows 
to go always afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, 
and every step that he took caused him the extremest 
anguish, he not once but many times walked the six 
hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his 
northernmost mission at Sonoma." 

One would naturally suppose that the people of 
California would be inordinately proud of these crum- 
bHng missions which have played so great a part in 
the history of their State and would take steps to have 
them preserved as national monuments, just as the 
French Government preserves its historic chateaux. 
But, for some unexplainable reason, just the opposite 
is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions 
assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in 
obtaining funds to effect even the most imperative re- 
pairs, depending very largely on the contributions of 
Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for 
this unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are 
still a young people, which, of course, is true. It is 
equally true, however, that by the time we are old 
enough to appreciate their historic significance and 
value, there will be no missions left to preserve. 

Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, 
you should not fail to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, 
not far from Santa Ynez, called, from the olive orchards 
which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn 
there kept by a Frenchman named Mattel — a Basque 
he is, if I remember rightly — who will serve you just 
such a meal as you can get at one of those wayside 

i8o 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

fondas in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los 
Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that in- 
stead of the roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-co£fee 
luncheon which the motorist learns to expect, we had set 
before us brook-trout fried in flour and bread-crumbs, 
ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garUc and 
oil, roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet 
a la Espagnole, and heaping bowls of wild strawberries, 
the whole washed down with a wine rarely seen in 
America — real white Chianti. It is the very unexpect- 
edness of such meals which makes them stand out like 
white milestones along the gastronomical highway. 

More Spanish in character and atmosphere even 
than Santa Barbara is Monterey, three hundred miles 
farther up this enchanted coast. Careless of the 
changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on 
its sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of 
palm and live-oak, its feet laved by the tepid waters 
of the bay. The town is built on the slopes of a natural 
amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour 
containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising 
steeply behind the town is the hill where the Spanish 
Castillo used to stand, which is now surmounted by 
grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow 
barracks which house the garrison. At the foot of 
Presidio Hill is the sheltered cove where Vizcaino 
landed to take possession of this region in the name of 
his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years 
later. Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it 
in the name of a far mightier King. Here, on clear 

i8i 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

days, you can see on the harbour bottom the bleached 
and whitened bones of the frigate Natalia, on which 
Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water- 
front, where the soiled and smelly fishing-boats with 
their queer lateen sails rub shoulders with the spotless, 
white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in 
the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on 
many strange and thrilling scenes, has this balconied 
building of whitewashed adobe; it has seen the high- 
prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with 
the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their 
carven sterns; it has seen the swarthy Spanish gov- 
ernors reviewing their steel-capped and cuirassed 
soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen ih.Q fiestas 
and other merrymakings which marked the careless 
Mexican regime; and on that July day in 1846 it 
saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the blue- 
jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American 
frigates, saw them form in hollow square upon the 
plaza, saw their weapons held rigid in burnished lines 
of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff, and 
heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of 
stripes and stars. 

In historic interest and significance this little 
town of Monterey is to the West what Boston is to 
the East. Here was planned the conquest of Cali- 
fornia; here the first American flag was raised upon 
the shores of the Pacific; here was the first capital and 
here was held the first constitutional convention of 
Cahfornia. Follow Alvardo Street up the hill, between 

182 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and white- 
washed walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, 
and geraniums, to the group of historic buildings at 
the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin house, 
where dwelt the last American consul in California and 
in which were hatched the plots which led up to the 
American occupation; the picturesque home of the 
last Spanish governor of the Calif ornias; Col ton Hall, 
in which the first constitutional convention assembled 
on the day of California's admission to the Union; 
the little one-roomed dwelling that Sherman and Hal- 
leck occupied when they were stationed here as young 
lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beau- 
tiful seiiorita whom Sherman loved long years before 
he won imperishable fame beneath the eagles at Shiloh; 
and, by no means least in interest, the wretched dwell- 
ing where that immortal genius Robert Louis Steven- 
son lodged for a year or more, and the little restaurant 
where he took his meals, and the green pathways which 
he wandered. 

In the edge of the town stands the church of San 
Carlos, one of the best preserved mission churches of 
California, whose sacristy contains the most precious 
religious relics in the State; for here the priest in charge 
will reverently show you Father Serra's own chasuble, 
cope, and dalmatics and the altar service of beaten 
silver which was brought out for him from Spain. 
The padre-presidente preferred Carmel over the hill 
to all his other missions, however, and it was there, 
where the Carmel River ripples down between the 

183 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

silent willows to its mother, the sea, that he came back 
to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient mis- 
sion, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours 
transformed from a savage wilderness to a vineyard 
of the Lord. 

From Monterey you may motor or drive or street- 
car or foot it to Del Monte, which is only a mile away. 
Whichever method you choose, I should take the long- 
est way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel 
through the glorious wild-wood by which it is envel- 
oped. And after you have twisted and turned for a 
mile or more through a wilderness of bloom and foliage, 
like the children in the story-book in search of the en- 
chanted castle, and after you have concluded that you 
have lost your way and are ready to abandon the quest, 
all unexpectedly you catch a glimpse of its red-roofed 
towers and spires and gables rising above the tree 
tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years 
ago, huge and rambling and not unpicturesque, sur- 
rounded by acres of lawn and the finest live-oaks I 
have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance to 
the Gezireh Palace — now a hostelry for tourists — which 
the Khedive Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del 
Monte suggests not one, but many places, however. 
Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is the 
result of more than a third of a century of care, in many 
respects recall the famous country-seats of England, 
though the vegetation, of course, is very different; 
the gardens, which offer a continual feast of colour, 
remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the 



THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 

cypress maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. 
The artificial lake, surrounded by subtropical vege- 
tation and approached by a palm-bordered esplanade, 
has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that 
I know, while from the golf-links — than which there are 
none better in the West — looking across the tree tops 
to where the white houses of Monterey overhang the 
bay, it is difficult to beheve that you are not on the 
hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon 
the white buildings of Algiers. Although Del Monte 
is an enchanted garden at any time of the year, the 
"high season" is in July and August, when the golfing, 
polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San 
Mateo exactly as the corresponding section of society 
on the other side of the continent flocks to Newport 
and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo 
field resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the 
click of mallet and baU; the golf-links on the roUing 
downs above the sea are ahve with players taking part 
in the great midsummer tournament which is the most 
important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in 
the evenings white-shouldered women and white-shirted 
men dip and whirl and glide to fervid music upon a 
glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the light 
of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers 
transform into a fairy-land. 

The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from 
south to north, as we did, for that was the way of the 
padres; so it was quite natural that our next stop after 
leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be 

i8s 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San 
Juan Bautista. San Juan Bautista — Saint John the 
Baptist — is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty little hamlet 
as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian 
road. Along its lanes — they are too narrow and strag- 
gling to be dignified with the name of streets — stand 
quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine and passion- 
vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by 
cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza 
up the hill, where the Spanish soldiery, and after them 
the Mexican, used to parade and where the fiestas 
used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not 
deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in 
obedience to the summons of the mission bells, and, 
thanks to the renaissance of the rural districts caused 
by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the 
hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is 
nearly always filled with guests. Close by the hotel 
is the old adobe building which served as the headquar- 
ters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and 
back of the town rises the hill known as the Hawk's 
Nest, where Fremont and his handful of American 
frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro 
and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan 
Bautista is a place where I could have loitered for a 
week instead of a day, for who, with a spark of romance 
in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the hotel 
note-paper: "A relic of the distant past, when men 
played billiards on horseback and the trees bore human 

fruit"? 

i86 



VII 
THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 



"He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews, 
On the topmost rim He set me, 'mong the hills of Santa Cruz, 
And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below — 
The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow." 



VII 

THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

I FIRST heard about the place from the captain 
of a little coasting steamer in the Indian Ocean. 
It was moonlight, I remember, and we were leaning 
over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl 
away from the vessel's bow. We had both seen more 
than our shares of the world and we were exchanging 
opinions of what we had seen over the captain's Trich- 
inopoli cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the 
moonUght on the silent waters, but I am more inclined 
to think it was the brandy which his silent-footed 
Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him 
to grow confidential. 

"A few more voyages and I'm going to quit the 
sea," he remarked. 

"Yes?" said I interrogatively. "And what will 
you do then? Get a berth as harbour master at 
Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?" 

"No," said he, "I'm going to build a house for 
myself and the missis in a valley that I know; a house 
painted white with green blinds and with a porch as 
broad as a ship's deck, and I'm going to have a fruit 
orchard and a flower garden with red geraniums in it, 
and I'm going to raise chickens — ^white Wyandottes, 
I think, but I'm not quite certain." 

189 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"Of all things!" I ejaculated. "My imagination 
isn't elastic enough for me to picture an old sea-dog 
like you settled down in a white farmhouse raising 
fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?" 

"In the Santa Clara," said he. 

"It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a 
tune in the hymn-book," said I. 

"It's neither," said he; "it's a valley in Cali- 
fornia." 

"Tell me about it," I suggested. 

"I can't," said he. "It's too beautiful — in the 
spring the whole valley is a sea of blossoms, like cherry 
season in Japan; and beyond are green hillsides that 
might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back 
of the hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that 
look like those at the back of Cintra, in Portugal (that's 
some place, too, believe me) ; and there is always the 
smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in Bulgaria 
in the attar-of-rose season; and I've never seen a sky 
as blue anywhere else except in the yEgean; and " 

"That's enough," I interrupted. "That's where 
I'm going next. Any place that will make a hardened 
old sea captain become poetical must be worth seeing." 

Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting 
at a small iron table on a sun-bathed terrace overlook- 
ing the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed shores of 
the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal 
it in all the world. As I sat gazing out across the 
waters toward France a fellow countryman strolled up 

190 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that he 
was an American by the width of his hat brim and 
because he didn't wait for an introduction. 

"Fine morning," I remarked pleasantly. "Won- 
derful view from this terrace, isn't it? And the sun- 
shine is very warm and cheering." 

"Pretty fair," he assented gloomily; "pretty fair 
for this place. But in the part of the world I come 
from fine mornings and wonderful views and sunshine 
are so darned common that it never occurs to us to 
mention them." 

"Where is your home, may I ask?" I inquired, 
for want of anything better to say. 

"In the Santa Clara Valley of California," he 
answered proudly. " God's favourite country, sir ! He 
took more pains with it than any place he ever made, 
not even barring the original Eden. This is a very 
pleasing little view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but 
I wish I could take you up on the slopes of Mount Ham- 
ilton just before sunset and let you look across the 
valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in 
blossom. As for the climate, why, say, my friend " 

"Yes, yes, I know," I said soothingly, for when a 
man gets a lump in his throat while talking about his 
native land it's time to change the topic of conversa- 
tion. "I know; I've heard all about it before. Fact 
is, I'm on my way there now." 

"You areV^ he exclaimed incredulously, and, 
leaning back in his chair, he clapped his hands until 
the Arab waiter came running. "Garsong," said he, 

191 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"bring us a bottle of the best wine youVe got." When 
the amber fluid was level with the rims we touched 
our glasses: 

"It's poor stuff compared with the wine we make 
in CaUfornia," he said, "but it'll do to drink a toast 
in." He stood up, bareheaded and very straight, as 
British officers do when they drink to the king. 

"Friend," said he, and his voice was husky, "here's 
to God's favourite valley — here's to the Santa Clara." 

If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which 
was in March, when the unfortunates who live beyond 
the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to find ice in 
their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of 
the valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms. 
It is a very beautiful festival, in which every man, 
woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long garden of 
fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate 
its true significance until you have climbed to a point 
on the slopes of the mountains which form the garden 
wall, where the whole enchanting panorama lies before 
you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five 
square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time ? 
No, of course not, for nowhere else in all the world can 
such a sight be seen. I, who have listened to the voice 
of spring on five continents and in more than five- 
score countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing. 

Personally, I shall always think of the Santa 
Clara as a sleeping maiden, fragrant with perfume and 
intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven bed formed 

192 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy 
clouds, her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose, 
quilted with green, edged with yellow; her pillow the 
sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When you 
come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which 
conceals her gracious form is in reaHty an expanse of 
fragrant blossoms; that the green tufts are the live- 
oaks which rise at intervals above the orchards of cherry, 
peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the 
California poppies which clothe the encircling hills. 

Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that 
the people of the Santa Clara Valley should celebrate 
the coming of the blossoms, for they are at once its 
chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season 
these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the 
breakfast tables of the world with one hundred and 
thirty million pounds of prunes, to say nothing of those 
luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which 
beckon temptingly from grocers' windows and hotel 
buffets from Salt Lake City around to Shanghai. No 
other single fruit of any region, not even the fig of 
Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the 
currant of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune 
of the Santa Clara Valley. The people of the valley 
will assure you very earnestly that the reason their 
wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is 
because they make it a point to eat prunes every morn- 
ing for breakfast. Whether due to the prunes or not, 
I can vouch for the complexions. 

Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is 
193 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

harvest time all the year round, but where the Arabs 
are offering no inducements to settlers, and the Imperial 
Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a 
place of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley 
has more crops, through more months of the year, than 
any place I know. Ceres makes her annual appear- 
ance in February with artichokes — the ones that are 
priced at a dollar a portion on the menus of New 
York's fashionable hotels; in March the people of 
the valley are having spring peas with their lamb 
chops; April brings strawberries, although, as a matter 
of fact, they are to be had almost every month of the 
year; in May the cherry pickers are at work; the local 
churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by 
the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams 
hauling cases of pears, plums, and apricots to the 
railway stations; August, being the month of prunes, 
is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars; 
September finds the presses working overtime turning 
grapes into wine, and the prohibitionists likewise work- 
ing overtime trying to turn "wet" communities into 
"dry" ones; in October the men are at work in the 
orchards picking apples and the women are at work 
in the kitchens baking apple pies; the huge English 
walnuts which wind up dinners half the world around 
are harvested in November; while in December and 
January the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty 
just long enough to let the fortunate worshippers 
at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After 
such a recital it is almost needless to add that the val- 

194 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

ley boasts both the largest fruit-drying houses and the 
largest fruit canneries in the world, for in the Santa 
Clara they dry what they can and can what they can't. 
The chef-lieu of the valley is San Jose. It may 
interest Easterners to know that Don Caspar de 
Portola and his men, marching up from the south in 
their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked 
down from the valley's mountain rim upon the spot 
where the city now stands four years before the Boston 
Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father 
Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San 
Jose, and was hard at work Christianising and teaching 
the Indians of this region before the ink was fairly 
dry on the Declaration of Independence and while 
the three thousand miles of country which lies between 
the valley of the Santa Clara and the valley of the Con- 
necticut was still an unexplored wilderness. The last 
time that the gentlemen with the census books knocked 
at San Jose's front doors they reported that the city 
had forty thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and 
agrowing. It has about four times as many stores as 
any place of its size that I can recall, but that is be- 
cause the local merchants depend on the trade of the 
rural rather than the urban population, for the hardy 
frontiersmen who rough it in this portion of the West 
run in to do their shopping by automobile or trolley- 
car or else give their orders over the telephone. There 
are two things about the city which I shall remember. 
One is the street-cars, which have open decks for- 
ward and aft, with seats running along them length- 

195 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

wise, on which the passengers sit with their feet hang- 
ing over the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car. 
In pleasant weather the display of ankles on the street- 
car makes them look, from the sidewalks, like moving 
hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature 
which riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated 
Eiffel Tower, sliced off about half-way up, which strad- 
dles the two main streets of the city at their intersec- 
tion, and from the top of which a powerful search-light 
signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the 
shepherd on the mountains, to the fisherman on San 
Francisco Bay: "Here is San Jose." 

If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is 
the fifty-mile-long one which meanders up the Santa 
Clara Valley, for there are more schoolhouses scat- 
tered along it than there are milestones, and they're 
not the little red schoolhouses of which our grand- 
fathers brag, either. Every time our motor-car swung 
around the corner of a prime orchard we were pretty 
certain to find a schoolhouse of concrete, usually in 
the overworked mission style of architecture, with 
roses and honeysuckle and wistaria clambering over 
the door. The youngster who wants to travel the royal 
road to knowledge can commence his journey in one of 
the concrete schoolhouses at Gilroy, which is at the 
southern portal of the valley; the second stage will 
take him up to the great high school at San Jose, 
which is so extensive and handsome and completely 
equipped that it would make certain famous Eastern 

colleges feel shamefaced and embarrassed; the final 

196 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

stage along this intellectual highway is only eighteen 
miles in length and ends at Palo Alto, amid whose live- 
oaks rise the yellow towers and red-tiled roofs of that 
great university which Leland Stanford, statesman and 
railway builder, founded in memory of the son he lost, 
and which he endowed with the whole of his enormous 
fortune. He gave the eight thousand acres of his 
famous stock-farm for the purpose, and to-day white- 
gowned "co-eds" wander, book in hand, where the 
paddocks once stood, and spike-shod sprinters dash 
down the track, where the great mare Sunol used to 
put close on half a mile a minute behind her spinning 
sulky wheels. It is one of the great universities of 
the world, is Leland Stanford, Jr., and, with its clois- 
tered quadrangles, its wonderful mosaic fagades, and 
its semitropical surroundings, certainly one of the 
most beautiful. It stands, fittingly enough, at the 
valley's northern gateway and at the end, both liter- 
ally and metaphorically, of the royal road to learning; 
so that the valley-bred youth who passes through its 
doors with his sheepskin in his pocket finds himself 
on the threshold of that great outside world for which, 
without leaving his native valley, he has been admi- 
rably prepared. 

Speaking of roads, they have built one running 
the length of the State and, therefore, of the Santa 
Clara Valley, which would cause Mr. John MacAdam, 
were he still in the land of the living, to lift his hat in 
admiration. It is really a restoration of El Camino 
Real, that historic highway which the Spanish con- 

197 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

quistadores built, close on a century and a half ago, 
for the purpose of linking up the one-and-twenty mis- 
sions which the indefatigable Padre Serra flung the 
length of California as outposts of the church, and which 
did more to open up the Pacific Coast to civihsation 
and colonisation and commerce than any undertaking 
save the construction of the Southern Pacific. Were 
this highway in the East I am perfectly sure that they 
would cheapen it by calHng it the Shore Road or the 
State Pike, but it speaks well for CaHfornia's appre- 
ciation of the picturesque and the appropriate that she 
has decided to cling to the historic name of El Camino 
Real — the Royal Road — the King's Highway. 

Although the Santa Clara Valley, properly speak- 
ing, ends at Palo Alto, the ultrafashionable colonies 
of Burlingame, San Mateo, and Hillsboro may, for the 
purposes of this chapter, at least, be considered as 
within its compass. These are to the Pacific Coast 
what Lenox and Tuxedo are to the Eastern world of 
fashion: places where the rich dwell in great country 
houses set far back in splendid parks, with none but 
their fellow millionaires for neighbours and with every 
convenience for sport close at hand. Full of colour and 
animation are the scenes at their ivy-covered stations 
when the afternoon trains from San Francisco pull in; 
for here, at least, the motor-car has not ousted the 
horse from his old-time popularity, and the gravelled 
driveways are alive with tandem carts and runabouts 
and spider phaetons, with smart grooms in whipcord 
liveries and leather gaiters standing rigidly at the heads 

198 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT/ 

of the horses. Probably the finest examples of architec- 
ture in California are to be seen in the neighbourhood 
of Burlingame and San Mateo, the only other communi- 
ties which can rival them in this respect being Monte- 
cito, near Santa Barbara, Oak Knoll, outside of Pasa- 
dena, and Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles. 

The East and, for that matter, all of the rest of 
America owe CaUfornia a debt of gratitude for her de- 
velopment of a native domestic architecture. The first 
true homes for folk of real culture but moderate incomes 
were produced on the Pacific Coast. In the type of 
house that abounds to-day in CaUfornia comfort, tradi- 
tion, and art have been skilfully and interestingly com- 
bined. Based on the old missions, which in their turn 
drew inspiration from the ideals of the Spaniard and 
the Moor, modern Californian architecture has never- 
theless made servants, not masters, of those traditions. 
Though drawing from the romantic background of the 
conquistadores and the padres the sturdy spirit, the 
simple lines, and the practical details of the old frontier 
buildings, the main virtue of these Californian homes 
is that they possess a definite relation to the soil and 
climate and the habits of the people. But, though 
back of each design lurks the motive of the Spanish 
missions, there is no monotony, no sameness; but, on 
the contrary, a remarkable variety of design. Each 
possesses the characteristic features of the Californian 
home: the low, wide-spreading roof lines, the solid 
walls, generally of concrete or plaster, the frank use 
of structural beams, the luxurious spaces of veranda 

199 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

and balcony, the tiled terraces and pottery roofs, the 
cool, inviting patios, and the quiet loveliness of the 
interiors. It is true, of course, that many house- 
builders have been unable to resist the temptation of 
Colonial, Norman, Dutch, and Tudor, but, as their 
culture increases, Californians are fast realising that 
an architecture designed for inhospitable climates is 
utterly incongruous in California's semitropical sur- 
roundings. 

It rained one of the days that I spent in San Jose, 
and my genial host was so apologetic about it that I 
actually felt sorry for him. Though rain is seldom 
unwelcome in a horticultural country, the residents 
don't like to have it come down in bucketfuls when 
visitors whom they are anxious to impress with the 
perfection of their climate are around. They are as 
proud of their climate in the Santa Clara Valley as a 
boy is of "his first long pants," and to back up their 
boasts the residents carry in their pockets the blue 
slips of the Government Weather Bureau's monthly re- 
ports to show the stranger. I'm not fond of figures, un- 
less they happen to be on cheques drawn in my favour, 
but I was impressed by the fact, nevertheless, that 
in 1913 the valley had only fifty-eight cloudy days, 
sixty-four which were overcast, and two hundred and 
thirty-four in which there was not a cloud to dim the 
turquoise of the sky. Carrying my investigations a 
little further, I found that during the greater part of 
February, which is the coldest month of the year, the 
mercury remained above 55, only four times dropping 

200 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

as low as 33, while there were only four days in August 
when the thermometer needle crept up to 79, and 
once in the same month it fell as low as 42, thus giving 
a solar-plexus blow to the idea stubbornly held by most 
Easterners that in summer California is an anteroom 
to Hades. 

To this unvarying geniality of the climate and to 
the careless, happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving strain 
handed down from the Spanish and Argonaut pioneers 
are due the invincible gaiety and the passionate love 
for the out-of-doors which are among the most likeable 
characteristics of the Californians. One of the first 
things that strikes an Eastern visitor is the fact that 
the Californians can always find time for amusement, 
and they enter into those amusements with the enthu- 
siasm and the whole-souled gaiety of children. On 
the Pacific Coast recreation is considered quite as 
important as business — and business does not suffer, 
either. There is about these Californian merrymakings 
an abandon, a joyousness, a childlike freedom from 
restraint which is in striking contrast to the restrained, 
self-conscious pleasures of the older, colder East. To 
the colourful fiestas of the Spanish and Mexican eras 
may be traced the out-of-door festivities which play so 
large a part in the life of the people on the Pacific 
Coast, such as the midwinter Tournament of Roses at 
Pasadena, the Portola Festival with which the San 
Franciscans celebrate the discovery of San Francisco 
Bay, the Feast of the Blossoms held each spring in 
the Santa Clara Valley, the Battle of Flowers which, 

201 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

until very recently, was a feature of life at Santa 
Barbara, but which, for some unexplainable reason, has 
been abandoned, the Rose Festival at Portland, the 
Potlatch at Seattle. Under much the same category 
are the classic plays given in the wonderful Greek The- 
atre at the University of California, the sylvan masks 
produced by the colony of authors and artists at Carmel- 
by-the-Sea, and the Bohemian Club's celebrated Grove 
Play. 

No account of CaHfornian festivals is in any way 
complete without at least a brief description of the 
last named, which is characterised by a beauty of 
production and a dignity of treatment that make it 
in many respects an American Bayreuth. For forty 
years the Bohemian Club of San Francisco has gone 
into the California redwoods each summer for a 
fortnight's outing. This famous club, founded in 1872 
by a coterie of actors, newspaper men, and artists, now 
has a membership of upward of thirteen hundred, 
representing all that is best in the art, music, literature, 
drama, and science of the West. No one may become 
a member who has not achieved a distinction of sorts 
in one of these fields, the anticommercial spirit which 
animates the club being aptly expressed by the quota- 
tion at the top of its note-paper: "Weaving spiders 
come not here." The Bohemian Grove, which consists 
of about three hundred acres of forest and contains 
some of the finest redwood giants in California, stands 
on the banks of the Russian River, ninety miles to the 
north of San Francisco. The stately redwoods stand 

202 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

in a gentle ravine whose floor and slopes in the rainless 
midsummer are bright with the canvas of the club 
encampment, which resembles a sort of sylvan Durbar; 
for the camps, many of which are elaborately arranged 
and furnished, are made of canvas in the gayest colours 
— scarlet and white, green and white, blue and yellow — • 
with flags and banners and gorgeous Oriental lanterns 
everywhere. Here, during the first two weeks in every 
August, congregate close on a thousand men who have 
done things — authors of "best sellers," builders of 
bridges and dams and lighthouses and aqueducts, 
painters whose pictures hang on the line at the Paris 
Salon or on the walls of the Luxembourg, composers 
of famous operas, writers of plays which have made a 
hit on Broadway, presidents of transcontinental rail- 
way systems, celebrated singers, men who have pene- 
trated to the remotest corners of the earth — wearing 
the dress of the woods, calling each other "Bill" or 
"Jim" or "Harry" as the case may be, and becoming, 
for the time being, boys once more. A steep side of 
the ravine forms the "back-drop" of the forest stage, 
the spectators — no woman has ever taken part in the 
play or witnessed an original performance — sitting 
on redwood logs under the stars. The Grove Play is an 
evolution from a simpler programme, which was origi- 
nally known as " High Jinks." It is now a serious com- 
position, with music, largely symbolical in character, 
created entirely by members of the club, in which 
many artists of international fame have taken part, 

always in the amateur spirit. ^ 

203 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

But to return to our Valley of the Santa Clara. 
In the Panhandle of Texas a ranch usually means any- 
where from five thousand acres upward of uncultivated 
land; in the Santa Clara a ranch means anywhere from 
five acres upward of the most highly cultivated soil 
in the world. East of the Sierra Nevada, where 
scientific fertilisation and intensive cultivation are still 
wearing short dresses, five acres are scarcely worth con- 
sidering, but five acres in California, properly planted 
and cared for, ofttimes supports a family in something 
akin to luxury. I had pointed out to me in the Santa 
Clara Valley at least a score of small holdings which 
yield their owners annually in the neighbourhood of 
five hundred dollars an acre. All of these hardy pio- 
neers have telephones and electric fights and electric 
power for pumping and daily newspaper and mail 
deliveries. When they have any business in town, 
instead of going down to the corral and roping a bronco, 
they either stroll through the orchard and hail an 
electric car or they crank up the family automobile. 

While I was in the Santa Clara Valley I asked a 
number of those questions to which every prospective 
home seeker wants to know the answers. I found that 
improved land, planted to prune, apricot, or peach 
trees old enough to bear, can be had all the way from 
four hundred to seven hundred dollars an acre, accord- 
ing to its location. At a conservative estimate this 
land, so I was told by a banker whose business it is to 
lend money on it (and you can trust a banker for never 
being oversanguine), can be depended upon to yield 

204 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

an income of from one hundred to three hundred dol- 
lars an acre, it being by no means an unusual thing for 
a well-managed ranch to pay for itself in two or three 
years. I found that a ten-acre orchard — ^which is 
quite large enough for one man to handle — could be 
had for five thousand dollars, the purchaser paying, 
say, two thousand dollars down and carrying the 
balance on a mortgage at seven per cent, which is the 
legal rate of interest in California. The local building 
and loan associations would lend him two thousand 
dollars to build with, which he could repay, at the rate 
of twenty-four dollars a month, in ten years. Two 
thousand dollars, I might add, will build an extremely 
attractive and comfortable six-room bungalow, for the 
two chief sources of expense to the Eastern home 
builder — cellars and furnaces — are not necessary in 
California. Such a place, provided its owner has 
horse sense, is not afraid of work, and knows good 
advice when he hears it, should yield from fifteen 
hundred to two thousand dollars a year, in addition to 
which the whole family can find ready employment, 
at excellent wages, in the orchards or packing-houses 
during the fruit season. For this work a man receives 
from two dollars to two dollars and a half a day and 
can count on fairly steady employment through at 
least eight months of the year, while many women and 
girls, whose deft fingers make them particularly valu- 
able in the work of wrapping and packing the finer 
grades of fruit, can earn as high as twenty dollars a 
week during the busy season. This work, I might add, 

205 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

attracts an altogether exceptional class of people, for 
university and high-school students and the wives and 
daughters of small ranchers eagerly avail themselves 
of this opportunity to add to their incomes, the fruit 
orchards, during the picking season, looking less like 
a hive of workers than like a gigantic picnic among the 
shaded orchard rows, in which the whole countryside 
is taking part. 

The air in the Santa Clara Valley is said to be 
the clearest in the world, though they tell you ex- 
actly the same thing at Colorado Springs, and in the 
Grand Canon of Arizona, and at Las Vegas, N. Mex. 
The Santa Clara air is clear enough, however, for all 
practical purposes. In fact, its extraordinary clarity 
sometimes lends itself to extraordinary uses. I have a 
friend whose residence is set on a hillside high on the 
valley's eastern rim. One day, idly scanning the dis- 
tant landscape through his field-glasses, he noted that 
the field hands employed on the ranch of a neighbour 
on the opposite hillside, twenty odd miles away, 
knowing that they could not be observed by their 
employer, were loafing in the shade instead of working. 
My friend called up his neighbour by telephone and 
told him that his men were soldiering, whereupon 
that gentleman rode up the hillside and gave his 
astonished employees such a tongue-lashing that when 
the six-o'clock whistle blew that night they had bHsters 
on their hands. 

Lack of labour is one of the most serious problems 

with which the fruit-growers of Cahfornia have had to 

206 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

contend, though it is believed that this will be remedied, 
in some measure at least, by the flood of European 
immigration which will pour through the Panama Canal. 
Twenty years ago the labour problem was solved by 
the Chinaman, who was the most industrious and 
dependable labourer California has ever had, but with 
the agitation which resulted in closing our doors to 
the Celestial most of the Chinese in California entered 
domestic service and now command such high wages — 
fifty dollars a month is the average wage of a Chinese 
house boy or cook — that only the well-to-do can afford 
to employ them. Time and again I have heard clear- 
headed Californians of all classes assert that the ad- 
mission, under certain restrictions, of a hundred 
thousand selected Chinese would prove an unqualified 
blessing for California. The relentless war waged by 
California — or, rather, by the labour element of Cali- 
fornia — against the admission of Chinese immigrants 
was based on the difference in the standard of living. 
The yellow man could live in something very akin to 
luxury on about a tenth of the ration required for a 
white man's support. In other words, the Chinaman 
could outstarve the white man; therefore the China- 
man must go. And there has never been any one to 
take his place. 

Outside of the Pacific Coast the impression seems 
to prevail that the Chinaman's place has been taken 
by the Japanese. This is not so. To begin with, Jap- 
anese labour is not cheap labour. The Japanese do 
not work for less pay than white men, unless it be tem- 

207 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

porarily, so as to obtain the white man's job. Japanese 
house cleaners and gardeners demand and receive a 
minimum wage of thirty-five cents an hour, and in 
Cahfornia, where most people of modest means are 
compelled to do their own housework because of the 
scarcity of and exorbitant wages demanded by domestic 
servants, housewives are thankful to get Japanese by 
the day at any price. Their standard of living is as 
high as that of other nationaHties; much higher, in 
fact, than that of peoples from southern Europe. 
There is no pauperism among them and astonishingly 
little crime. They dress well, eat well, spend money 
lavishly for entertainment. But the Jap, unlike the 
Chinaman, "talks back." He is not in the least im- 
pressed by the American's claim of racial superiority. 
In fact, he considers himself very much better than the 
white man and, if the opportunity presents itself, 
does not hesitate to say so. He is patronising instead 
of patronised. He has proved that he is the white 
man's equal in every hne of industry and in some his 
superior. Three times in succession a Japanese grower 
has virtually cornered the potato crop of the Pacific 
Coast. The Japanese has driven the Greek and the 
Portuguese out of the fishing industry, in which they 
believed that they were impregnably intrenched. As 
a result of these things he steps off the sidewalk for no 
one. He knows that back of him stands a great empire, 
with a powerful fleet and one of the most efficient 
armies in existence, and he takes no pains to disguise 
this knowledge in his relations with the white man. 

208 



THE VALLEY OF HEART'S DELIGHT 

To tell the truth, the prohibition of land owner- 
ship, the segregation of school children are but pre- 
texts put forward by a jealous and resentful white 
population to teach the yellow man his place. The 
assertion that Japanese ownership of land is a menace 
to white domination is the veriest nonsense, and every 
Californian knows it. There are ninety-nine million 
acres in California and of this area the Japanese own or 
lease barely thirty thousand acres, or twelve hundredths 
of one per cent. The fifty-eight thousand Japanese in 
California form but two and one half per cent of the 
total population. These figures, which are authori- 
tative, are not very menacing, are they? The bulk 
of the Japanese reside in Los Angeles County and in 
the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, 
where they work gigantic potato fields and truck-gar- 
dens and asparagus beds. Now, Los Angeles, mind 
you, has never demanded Japanese exclusion. Pro- 
tests poured into Sacramento from the white settlers 
of the delta country against the passage of the anti- 
alien land laws. Why, then, you ask, does the entire 
Pacific Coast, including British Columbia, exhibit such 
intense dislike for the Jap? Because, as I have said, 
he has shown that he can beat the white man at his own 
game; because he is not in the least meek and humble 
as befits an alien and "inferior" race; because he 
believes in his heart that in an armed conflict Nippon 
could whip the United States as thoroughly as she 
whipped China and Russia; because, as a result of 

this belief, he perpetually swaggers about with his 

2og 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

hat cocked on one side and a chip perched invitingly 
on his shoulder; because, in short, his very manner is 
a constant irritation to the Californians. And until 
the status of the Japanese upon the Pacific Coast 
is definitely and finally established by international 
treaty this irritation may be expected to continue 
and to increase. 

I wonder if sometimes, at that sunset hour when 
the lengthening shadows of the hills fall athwart the 
blossoming orchards, there do not wander through 
the Santa Clara those whom the eyes of mortals can- 
not see — Portola, swart of face under his steel cap, 
come back to feast his eyes once more, from the top 
of yonder hill, on that fertile valley which he was the 
first white man to see; Father Serra, mild-mannered 
and gentle-voiced, trudging the dusty highroad in his 
sandals and woollen robe, pausing to kneel in prayer 
as the bells boom out the Angelus from that mission 
which he founded; Captain Jedediah Smith, the first 
of the pathfinders, a strange and romantic figure in 
his garb of fringed buckskin, leaning on his long rifle 
as he looks down on the homesteads of the thousands 
who followed by the trail he blazed across the ranges; 
Stanford, who linked the oceans with twin lines of 
steel, pacing the campus of that great seat of learning 
which he conceived and built — guardian spirits, all, 
of that valley for which they did so much and which 
they loved so well. 



2IO 



VIII 
THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 



"For once you've panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust, 

Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell; 
It's little else you care about; you go because you must, 

And you feel that you could follow it to hell. 
You'd follow it in hunger, and you'd follow it in cold; 

You'd follow it in solitude and pain; 
And when you're stiff and battened down let some one whisper 'Gold,' 

You're lief to rise and follow it again." 



VIII 
THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

I ONCE knew an Englishman and his wife who were 
possessed with a mania for things Egyptian. 
Some people were unkind enough to say that they were 
"dotty" on the subject, but that was an exaggeration. 
They knew all there was to know about Egyptian 
customs from the days of Amenhotep to those of Abbas 
Hilmi; they had delved in the sand-smothered ruins 
across the river from Luxor; they could converse as 
fluently in the degraded patois of the native coffee- 
houses as in the classic Arabic spoken at the Uni- 
versity of El Azhar. Their chief regret in hfe was that 
they had not been born Egyptians. Their names were 
— ^but never mind; it is enough to say that they had 
coronets on their visiting cards and owned more fer- 
tile acres in Devonshire than an absentee landlord has 
any right to possess. Whenever they came to Cairo, 
which they did regularly at the beginning of the 
cold weather, they could never be induced to take 
the comfortable motor-bus which the management of 
Shepheard's Hotel thoughtfully provides for its guests 
— at ten piastres the trip. Instead, they would wire 
ahead to have a couple of camels meet them at the 
station, and, perched atop of these ungainly and un- 

213 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

comfortable beasts, would amble down the Sharia 
Kamel, which is the Fifth Avenue of Cairo, and dis- 
mount with great pomp and ceremony in front of 
their hotel to the delectation of the tourists assembled 
upon its terrace. I once asked them why they chose 
this outlandish mode of conveyance when there were a 
score or so of perfectly good taxicabs whose vocifer- 
ously importunate drivers were only awaiting a signal 
to push down their little red flags and set their taxim- 
eters whirring. 

"Well, it's this way," was the answer. "We're 
jolly fond of everything Egyptian, y' know. Sort of 
steeped ourselves, as you might say, in the country's 
history and politics and customs and language and all 
that sort of thing. This city is so romantic and pic- 
turesque that a motor-car seems to be inappropriate 
and unfitting — like wearing a top hat in the country, 
y' know. So we always have the camels meet us — ^yes. 
All bally nonsense, I suppose, but it sort of keeps us 
in the spirit of the place — makes us feel as though we 
were living in the good old days before the tourist 
Johnnies came and spoiled it all. Same idea that 
Vanderbilt has in driving his coach from London down 
to Brighton. You can make the trip by train in half 
the time and for half the money and much more com- 
fortably, but you lose the spirit of the old coaching 
days — the atmosphere, as the painter fellows call it. 
Rum sort of an idea to use camels instead of taxis, 
perhaps, but we like it and that's the chief thing after 
all, isn't it? What?" 

214 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

That was precisely the frame of mind which caused 
us to disregard the one hundred and twenty-five miles 
of oiled highway which reaches, like a strip of hotel 
linoleum, from San Francisco to the Californian 
capital, and load ourselves, together with our six- 
cylindered Pegasus, aboard the stern-wheel river boat 
which leaves the Pacific Street wharf for Sacramento 
at half past eight on every week-day morning. That 
section of our Mexico-to-Alaska journey which lay 
immediately before us, you must understand, led 
through a region which is indelibly associated with 
"the days of old, the days of gold, the days of 'Forty- 
Nine," and to storm through it in a prosaic, panting 
motor-car seemed to us as incompatible with the spirit 
of romance which enshrouds it as it would to race 
through the canals of Venice in a gasoline launch. 
Feeling as we did about it, the consistent thing, I 
suppose, would have been to have hired a creaking 
prairie-schooner and plodded overland to the mines in 
true emigrant fashion, but as the few prairie-schooners 
still extant in California have fallen into the hands of 
the moving-picture concerns, who work them overtime, 
we compromised by journeying up to the gold country 
by river boat, just as the Argonauts who came round 
the Horn to San Francisco were wont to do. 

Whoever was responsible for dubbing the Sacra- 
mento River trip "the Netherlands Route" could have 
had but a bowing acquaintance with Holland. I don't 
like to shatter illusions, but, to be quite truthful, the 
banks of the Sacramento are as unlike the Low Coun- 

215 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

tries as anything well could be. The only thing they 
have in common are the dikes or levees which border 
the streams and the truck-gardens which form a 
patchwork quilt of vegetation behind them. The Dutch 
waterways are, for the most part, small, insignificant 
affairs, third or fourth cousins to the Erie Canal, and 
so narrow that you can sling your hat across them. 
The Sacramento River, on the contrary, is a great 
maritime thoroughfare four hundred miles in length 
and navigable for three quarters of that distance, 
being fourth among the rivers of the United States in 
tonnage carried. From the deck of a Dutch canal- 
boat you cannot see a mountain, or anything which 
could be called a mountain by courtesy, with a tele- 
scope. Look in whichever direction you will from a 
Sacramento River boat and you cannot escape them. 
Even at night you can descry the great walls of the 
Coast and Sierra Nevada Ranges looming black 
against a purple-velvet sky. And the racing windmills 
with their weather-beaten sails — the most character- 
istic note in a Dutch landscape — are not there at all. 
It's rather a pity, it seems to me, that Cahfornians 
persist in this slap-dash custom of labelling the natural 
beauties for which their State is famous with European 
tags. Why, in the name of heaven, should that en- 
chanted littoral which stretches from Coronado to 
Monterey be called "Our Italy"? Why should the 
seaward slopes of the Santa Ynez Range, at the back of 
Santa Barbara — a region which is Spanish in history, 
language, and tradition— be dubbed "the Riviera"? 

216 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

Why should Santa Barbara itself, for that matter, be 
called "the American Mentone"? Is there a single 
sound reason why the majestic grandeur of the Sierra 
Nevada should be cheapened by labelling it "the 
American Alps"? No, not one. And it seems to me, 
as a visitor, a travesty to nickname the Sacramento, a 
river as long and as commercially important as the 
Seine and draining the greatest agricultural valley in 
the world, "the Netherlands Route" — because, for- 
sooth portions of its banks are protected against 
overflow by levees. Compare the wonders of Cali- 
fornia to those of Europe by all means, if you will, 
and nine times out of ten they will emerge victorious 
from the comparison; but for goodness' sake don't 
saddle them with names which in themselves imply 
secondariness. 

The Sacramento is a river of romance. To those 
conversant with the stirring story of early California, 
its every bend and reach and landing-place recalls 
some episode of those mad days when the news that a 
man had discovered yellow gravel in a Sierran mill- 
race spread like a forest-fire across the land, and the 
needy, the desperate, and the adventurous came pour- 
ing into Cahfornia by boat and wagon-train. About 
it still hover memories of the days when this river of 
dikes ran between high banks; when the great valley 
to which it gives its name was as unsettled and un- 
known as the basin of the Upper Congo; when Sacra- 
mento, then but a cluster of tents about a log stockade, 

was an outpost on the firing-line of civilisation. This 

217 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

winding stream was the last stage in the long journey 
of those gold hunters who came round the Horn in 
their stampede to the mines. The river voyage was 
one of dreams and doubts, of hopes and fears. At 
every landing where the steamer touched were heard 
reports of new bonanzas found in the Sierran gulches, 
of gold strikes on the river bars, of mountain brooks 
whose beds were aglitter with the precious ore. Re- 
turning down this same river, as time went on, were 
the booted, bearded, brown-faced men who were going 
home — ah, happy word! — after having "made their 
pile" and those others who had staked and lost their 
all. 

The river trip of to-day gives graphic proof of 
the changes which threescore years have wrought; it 
shows that agriculture, not mining, is now the basis 
of the State's prosperity, just as it must be the basis 
of every civiHsation which is to endure. The interest 
commenced at the journey's very start. Swinging 
out from the unending procession of ferries which 
form, as it were, a Brooklyn Bridge between Oakland 
and San Francisco, we churned our way under the 
cliffs of Alcatraz, the white-walled prison perched upon 
its summit looking for all the world like the sea-fowl for 
which this penal isle is named. Though Alcatraz may 
lack the legendary interest which attaches to the Cha- 
teau d'lf , that rocky islet in the harbour of Marseilles 
where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned, it 
is no less picturesque, particularly at sunset, when the 
expiring rays of the drowning sun, striking through 

218 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

the portals of the Golden Gate, transform it into a 
lump of rosy coral rising from a peacock sea. Off our 
port bow Tamalpais, a weary colossus wrapped in a 
cape of shaggy green, looked meditatively down upon 
the heedless city as, seated upon the hills, he laved his 
feet— the Marin and Tiburon Peninsulas — in the cool- 
ing waters of the bay. Keeping well to the eastern 
shore, where the lead shows seven fathoms clear, we 
skirted the city's shipping front, where fishing-boats, 
their hulls painted the bright hues the Latins love, and 
some — the Greek-owned ones — with great goggle eyes 
at their bows (the better to detect the fish, of course), 
were slipping seaward like mallards on the wing. To 
starboard lay the shores of Contra Costa County 
(meaning, as you doubtless surmise, "the opposite 
coast"), the long brown fingers of its innumerable 
wharfs reaching out into the bay as though beckoning 
to the merchantmen to come alongside and take 
aboard the cargoes ^ — oil, wine, lumber, grain, cheese, 
fruit — which had been produced in the chimneyed 
factories that fringe this coast or raised in the fertile 
valleys which form its hinterland. Crossing over to 
the port rail as our steamer poked its stubby nose into 
the narrow Straits of Carquinez, we could make out 
Mare Island Navy Yard with the fighting craft in 
their coats of elephant grey riding lazily at anchor in 
front of it, while against the hill slopes at the back 
snuggled the white houses of Vallejo, the former capital. 
Our first stop was at Benicia, on the right bank 
of the Carquinez Straits, which lie directly athwart 

219 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the Overland Route to the East and are familiar to 
transcontinental travellers as the place where their 
entire train, from engine to observation-car, is loaded 
on a titanic ferry. This was the home of Heenan, the 
"Benicia Boy," the blacksmith who fought his way 
upward to the heavyweight championship of the 
world, and the forge hammer he used is still proudly 
preserved here as a memento of the brawny youngster 
who linked the drowsy village with a certain brand of 
fame. Benicia succeeded Vallejo as the capital of 
California, and the old State House where the Argo- 
naut lawmakers held their uproarious sessions still 
stands as a monument to the town's one-time impor- 
tance, which departed when its parvenu neighbour, 
Sacramento, offered the State a cool miUion in gold for 
the honour of being its capital. 

Leaving sleepy Benicia, with its memories of prize- 
fighters and lawmakers, in our wake, we debouched 
quite suddenly into Suisun Bay (suggestive of Japan 
and the geisha girls, isn't it ?) with the Suisun marshes 
just beyond. You will have to journey north to Great 
Central Lake, in the heart of Vancouver Island, or 
south to Lake Chapala, in the Mexican State of JaHsco, 
to get wild-fowl shooting to equal that on these grey 
marshes, for here, in what Easterners call winter- time 
but which Californians designate duck time, or the 
season of the rains, come mallard, teal, sprig, and 
canvasback, plover, snipe, and brant, in flocks which 
literally darken the sky. In the waters hereabouts is 
centred the fishing industry of the Sacramento River, 

220 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

which has been monopolised by swarthy, red-sashed 
fellows who speak the patois of Sicily or Calabria or 
the Greek of the ^gean Isles. No wonder that these 
sons of the south look on California as a land of gold, 
for an industrious fisherman, who will attend to his 
nets and leave alone the brandy and red wine of which 
they are all so fond, can earn twenty-five dollars a 
week without any danger of contracting heart disease; 
his brother in Palermo or the Piraeus would consider 
himself an Andrew Carnegie if his weekly earnings 
amounted to that many lire or drachmcB, If one is in 
quest of colour and picturesqueness he can steep him- 
self in them both by taking up his residence for a time 
among these fisherfolk of Suisun Bay, but if he does 
so he had better take the precaution of keeping a 
serviceable revolver in his coat pocket and leaving his 
address with the river police. 

The delta formed by the Sacramento and San 
Joaquin Rivers, which, after paying toll to the fruitful 
valleys through which they pass, clasp hands near 
Suisun Bay and wander together toward the sea, bears 
a striking resemblance to the maze of islands and la- 
goons and weed-grown waterways at the mouth of the 
Nile. Some of these low-lying islands are but camping 
grounds for migrating armies of wild fowl; on others, 
whose rich fields are guarded by high dikes such as 
you see along the Scheldt, are the truck-gardens, 
tended with the painstaking care that makes the 
Oriental so dangerous a competitor of the Caucasian. 
It is these river gardens which make it possible for the 

221 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

San Franciscan to have asparagus, peas, artichokes, 
alligator pears, and strawberries on his table from 
Christmas eve around to Christmas morning, and more 
cheaply than the New Yorker can get the same things 
in cans. Indeed, a quarter of the asparagus crop of 
the United States comes from these levee-shielded tule 
lands along the Sacramento. That, I suppose, is why 
it is so hard for an Eastern hon vivant to impress a 
Californian. The New Yorker, thinking to give his San 
Franciscan friend a real treat, takes him to Sherry's 
or the Plaza and, shutting his eyes to the prices on the 
menu, orders a meal in which such out-of-the-season 
deHcacies as asparagus figure largely. 

"Quite like home," remarks the Californian care- 
lessly. "My wife writes that she is getting asparagus 
from our own garden every day now and that straw- 
berries are selling in the market for fifteen cents a box. 
Alligator-pear salad? Not any, thanks. The chef at 
the club insists on giving it to us about four times a 
week, so I'm rather tired of it. If it's all the same to 
you I think I'd like some pumpkin pie and milk." 

Hanging over the rail, I took huge delight in watch- 
ing the stream of traffic which turned the river into a 
maritime Broadway: stern- wheel passenger steamers, 
ploughing straight ahead, with never a glance to right 
or left, like a preoccupied business man going to his 
office; busy httle launches, teuf-teuffing here and there 
as importantly as district messenger boys; panting 
freighters with strings of grain-laden barges in tow; 
ugly, ill-smelling tank-steamers carrying Mr. Rocke- 

222. 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

feller's petroleum to far-off, outlandish ports; scow- 
schooners, full sisters of those broad-beamed, huge- 
sailed lumbering craft which bring the products of the 
Seine banks down to the Paris markets; big black 
dredgers, mud-stained and grimy, like the labourers 
they are, hard at work reinforcing the dikes against 
the winter floods; tide- working ferries, lazy, ingenious, 
resourceful craft which swing across the river, up- 
stream or down, making the current or the tide or both 
do their work for them. 

After Isleton is passed the river settles down to 
an even width of sixscore yards, flowing contentedly 
between banks festooned with wild grape-vines and 
shaded by oaks and walnuts, sycamore and willows, 
between which we caught fleeting glimpses of pros- 
perous homes whose splendid trees and ordered gardens 
reminded us of country places we knew along the 
Thames. This is the most beautiful part of the river 
by far. Every now and again we glimpsed the mouth 
of a leafy bayou which seemed to invite us to explore 
its alluring recesses in a canoe. A moment later a 
little bay would disclose a fine old house with stately 
white columns and a mansard roof — the result, most 
probably, of the owner's success in the gold-fields 
sixty years ago. These homes along the Sacramento 
have none of the nouveau riche magnificence of the 
mansions at Pasadena and Montecito, but they are 
for the most part dignified and characteristic of that 
formative and romantic period in which they were 
built. Clarksburg, one hundred and ten miles from 

223 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

San Francisco, is the last stop before Sacramento, 
ten miles farther on. Here the river banks become 
more busy. Steam, motor, and electric lines focalise 
upon the capital. We passed a colony of house-boats, 
not the floating mansions one sees at Henley, but 
simple, unpretentious craft which admirably answer 
their purpose of passing a summer holiday. Wharfs 
began to appear. A great black drawbridge, thrusting 
its imlovely length across the river, parted sullenly 
for us to pass. Above a cluster of palms and blossom- 
ing magnolias the dome of the capitol appeared, the 
last rays of the setting sun striking upon its gilded 
surface and turning it into a flaming orb. The air was 
heavy with the fragrance of camellias. A bell tinkled 
sharply in the engine room, the great stern wheel 
churned the water frantically for a moment and then 
stopped, the boat glided deftly alongside the wharf, 
the gang-plank rumbled out. "All ashore!" bawled 
someone. "All ashore! Sacramento!" 

In the gold-rush days Sacramento was to the min- 
ing region what Johannesburg is to the Rand — a base 
of supplies, a place of amusement, where the miners 
were wont to come to squander their gold-dust over the 
poHshed bars of the saloons and dance halls or on 
the green tables of the gambling-houses. Those were 
the free-and-easy days when anything costing less 
than a dollar was priced in "bits," a bit having no 
arbitrary value but being equivalent to the amount 
of gold-dust which could be held between the thumb 
and forefinger. In the days when placer mining was 

224 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

in its glory, debts were discharged in gold-dust instead 
of coin, and it often happened when a man was paying 
a small grocery bill, or more particularly when he was 
buying a drink, the bartender, instead of taking the 
trouble to weigh the dust, would insert his thumb 
and forefinger in the miner's buckskin "poke" and 
lift a pinch of gold-dust. So it came to pass that when 
a man appHed for a job as bartender his ability to fill 
the position would be tested by the proprietor asking, 
"How much can you raise at a pinch?" whence the 
familiar colloquialism of the present day. The more 
that he could raise, of course, the more valuable he 
would be as an employee, the chief requisite for a suc- 
cessful bartender being, therefore, that he should have 
splay fingers. In gold-rush times steamers ran daily 
from San Francisco to Sacramento, just as they do to- 
day, for the river provided the quickest and easiest 
means of reaching the mines from the coast, while six- 
horsed Concord coaches, the names of whose drivers 
were synonyms for reckless daring, tore along the roads 
to Marysville, Stockton, and Nevada City as fast as 
the horses could lay foot to ground. 

To fully appreciate the miracle of reclamation, 
whereby the banks of the Sacramento have been trans- 
formed from worthless drowned lands into the richest 
gardens in the world, you should motor down the 
splendid boulevard which for a dozen miles or more 
parallels the river. The miners along the Sacramento 
early found that the easiest and cheapest method of 
getting gold was to direct a powerful stream of water 

225 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

against the hillsides, washing the hills away and di- 
verting the resultant mud into long sluice-boxes, in 
which the gold was collected. The residue of mud and 
water was then turned back into the streams again and 
was carried down and deposited in the bed of the 
Sacramento River, gradually decreasing its capacity 
for carrying off flood waters and making its navigation 
impossible for large boats. Hence, when the spring 
freshets came the swollen river overflowed and dev- 
astated the farms and orchards along its banks. For 
forty years this sort of thing continued, the protests 
of the farmers and fruit growers being ignored, for 
in those days the miners virtually ruled the land. 
But as time wore on, mining gradually decreased in 
importance and agriculture grew, until, in 1893, the 
farming interests became powerful enough to induce 
Congress to stop all hydraulic mining and to put all 
mining operations on streams in the San Joaquin and 
Sacramento Valleys under the control of the California 
Debris Commission. Once rid of the bugaboo of the 
hydraulic nozzle and its resultant obstruction of the 
river channels, the farmers along the Sacramento got 
together and purchased a number of clam-shell dredgers 
and set to work to build new levees and to repair the 
old ones. If you will follow the course of the Sacra- 
mento for a few miles outside the capital, either by 
road or river, you will see them at work. It is very 
interesting. A great arm, ending in a sort of hand like 
two clam-shells, reaches out over the river and the 
hand plunges into the stream. When the hand, which 

226 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

is in reality a huge steel scoop with hinged jaws, emerges 
from its gropings at the river-bottom it is filled with 
sand, whereupon the arm carries it over and empties 
it upon the bank. This is the way in which the dikes 
which border the Sacramento are constructed, one 
clam-shell dredger doing as much work in a day as 
five hundred men. As a result of this ingenious con- 
trivance you can make the circuit of Grand Island on 
an oiled road, forty feet wide, which has been built 
on top of the dikes. Below you on one side is the river; 
on the other orchards and gardens from which come 
annually a quarter of the world's asparagus crop, the 
earliest cherries in the United States, and a million 
boxes of pears. 

I think that the most significant thing that I saw 
in Sacramento was Sutter's Fort, or, to be quite ac- 
curate, the restored remnants of it. Three quarters 
of a century ago this little rectangular fortification was 
the westernmost outpost of American civilisation. 
In 1839 a Swiss soldier of fortune named John Augus- 
tus Sutter obtained from the Mexican Government a 
grant of eleven square leagues of land on the banks of 
the Sacramento River and permission to erect a stock- 
ade as a protection against the encroachments of the 
Indians. The stockade, however, quickly grew into 
something closely resembling a fort, with walls loop- 
holed for musketry and capable of resisting any attack 
unsupported by artillery. Sutter's Fort, or "New 
Helvetia, " as the owner called his little kingdom, was 
on the direct line of overland immigration from the 

227 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

East, and as a result of the strategic position he occu- 
pied and of his influence with the Mexican authorities, 
Sutter soon became the virtual ruler of all this Sierran 
region. During those stirring days when Fremont 
and his frontiersmen came riding down from the passes, 
it was this Swiss-American adventurer who held the 
balance of power on the Pacific Coast, and it was in no 
small measure due to the encouragement and aid he 
gave the American settlers that California became 
American. The old frontiersman died in poverty, the 
great domain of which he was the owner having been 
wrested from him, on one pretext and another, each 
flimsier than the one preceding, during the turmoil 
and lawlessness which marked the gold-rush days. 
To-day the old fort is the centre of a highly landscaped 
city park; the muzzles of its brass field-guns frown 
from their embrasures down paved and shaded avenues; 
street-cars clang their noisy way past the gates which 
were double-barred at night against the attacks of 
marauding bands of Mexicans and Indians; and at 
night spluttering arc-lamps illuminate its loopholed, 
vine-clad walls. Sacramento has acknowledged the 
.great debt she owes to Sutter by giving his destitute 
grandson employment as a day labourer on the grounds 
of the fort which his grandfather built and to which 
the capital city of California owes its being. 

There are two routes open to the automobilist 
between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe and, historically 
as well as scenically, there is little to choose between 
them. The PlacerviUe route, though considerably the 

228 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

longer, traverses the country immortalised by Bret 
Harte and inseparably associated with the "'Forty- 
Niners." From Sacramento to Folsom the highway 
follows the route of the first railroad built in California, 
this jerk-water line, constructed in 1854 to take the 
miners in and the gold-dust out, being the grandfather 
of those great systems which now cover the State with 
a cobweb of steel. At Folsom, built on the edge of a 
sheer cliff high above the waters of the American River, 
is the stone-walled chateau where a thousand or more 
gentlemen who have emerged second best from argu- 
ments with the law are dwelling in enforced seclusion 
at the expense of the State. Placerville is the historic 
"Hangtown" of early days, having gained its original 
name from the fact that the sacredness of law and order 
was emphasised there in the good old days by means 
of frequent entertainments known as "necktie parties," 
the hosts at these informal affairs being committees 
of indignant citizens. At them the guest of honour 
made his positively last appearance. It was here 
that "Wheelbarrow John" Studebaker, by sticking to 
his trade of wheelwright instead of joining in the mad 
stampede to the diggings, laid the foundation for that 
great concern whose vehicles are known wherever 
there are roads for wheels to run on. At Coloma, not 
far from Placerville, a heroic statue does honour to the 
memory of John Marshall, the news of whose discovery 
of yellow sand in a mill-race brought fortune seekers 
flocking Californiaward from every quarter of the 
globe. Though fruit growing has long since succeeded 

229 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

mining as the chief industry of this region, and though 
the buildings mentioned in the stories of Bret Harte and 
Mark Twain have for the most part gone to wrack and 
ruin, these towns of the "Mother Lode" still retain 
enough of their old-time interest and picturesqueness 
so that it does not require a Bausch & Lomb imagina- 
tion to picture them as they were in the heyday of 
their existence, when their streets and barrooms and 
dance halls were filled with the flotsam and jetsam of 
all the earth: wanderers from dim and distant ports, 
adventurers, seafarers, soldiers of misfortune, gamblers, 
absconding bank clerks, farmers, unsuccessful mer- 
chants, out-at-elbows professional men, men of uneasy 
conscience and women of easy virtue, world without 
end. 

When Congress put an end to hydraulic mining 
the mining men made an outcry that rose to heaven. 
The prosperity of California was ended. The State 
was going to the bow-wows. There was nothing but 
gloom and disaster ahead. The companies that owned 
the water-rights along the American River planted 
their properties to grape-vines and used their hydrau- 
lic apparatus to water them with. But always they 
were tormented with the knowledge that under the 
roots of the vines was gold, gold, gold. Spurred on by 
this knowledge, there was devised a new process of 
gold extraction; a process that not only did not de- 
posit any debris in the rivers but which proved to be 
far more profitable than the old. Ground that had 
not yielded enough gold to pay for its being worked 

230 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

was turned into "pay dirt" through the agency of the 
giant gold dredger invented in New Zealand and later 
developed to its highest efficiency in California. Pic- 
ture to yourself a boulder-strewn field, covered with the 
tailings of old mining operations, with here and there 
a pit as large as the foundation for a sky-scraper made 
by the hydraulic miners. Each successive layer of 
gravel in this field, straight down to bed-rock, bears 
gold in small quantities — gold brought there ages ago 
by the waters of the river. To extract this gold by the 
old methods was obviously as unprofitable as it was 
illegal. So they tried the new method imported from 
the gold-fields of New Zealand. It is not easy to ex- 
plain the workings of a modern gold dredger unless 
you have seen one. Go out into the middle of a field 
and dig a pit — a pit large enough to contain a city 
office-building. Run water into the pit until it becomes 
a mud-hole. Then build in that mud-hole a great steel 
caisson of several thousand cubic tons displacement. 
There you have the basis of the mammoth contrivances 
which have supplanted the 'Forty-Niner's pick and 
pan. Each of these dredgers costs a quarter of a mil- 
lion dollars to build and labours night and day. The 
business end of the dredger consists of an endless chain 
of buckets, each of which weighs two tons when empty, 
which burrow down into the mud-hole until they strike 
bed-rock. The gravel which they bring up, after being 
saturated with water, is passed over quicksilver tables 
which collect the gold, and runs out again at the bottom 
of the pit, thus reversing the natural arrangement of 

231 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the soil, the dirt being left on the bottom and the 
gravel and cobbles on top. It costs in the neighbour- 
hood of seven thousand dollars a month to operate 
one of these dredgers, but the resultant "clean-up" 
pays for this several times over. Not only is the gold 
extracted from the earth as effectually as a bartender 
squeezes the juice out of a lemon,. but rock crushers 
convert the mountains of cobbles into material for 
building highways all over the surrounding region, and 
on the aerated and renovated soil which the dredgers 
leave behind them any crop on earth will thrive. Thus 
has mechanical genius succeeded in turning those heredi- 
tary enemies. Agriculture and Mining, into coworkers 
and friends. 

Because we wished to follow the route which the 
overland emigrants had taken in their epoch-making 
march, we did not go to Tahoe through Placerville, 
which is connected with Tallac, at the southern end of 
the lake, by one of the finest motor highways in Cali- 
fornia, but chose the more direct and equally good 
road which climbs over the Sierras by way of Colfax, 
Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap. Upward and upward 
wound our road, like a spiral stairway to the skies. 
One of the most characteristic features of this Sierra 
region is that the traveller can see at a glance the lay 
of the whole land. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, 
not from the Saint Bernard, or Ararat, or even from 
Darjeeling, can one command such comprehensive views 
as are to be had from the rocky promontory known as 
Cape Horn, or from Summit, which, as its name im- 

232 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

plies, is at the top of the pass. At our feet, like a map 
spread out upon the ground for our inspection, lay 
California. The dense forests which clothed the upper 
slopes of the Sierras gave way to orchards of pear and 
apple, and these changed to the citrus groves which 
flourish on the lower, balmier levels, and the green of 
the orange zone ended abruptly in the yellow of the 
grain-fields, and this merged into the checker-board of 
the truck-gardens, and through these we could dimly 
descry the blue ribbon of the Sacramento turning and 
twisting and doubling on its tortuous way to the sea. 
The summit of the pass is one hundred and five 
miles from Sacramento, and in that distance we had 
ascended just seven thousand feet, or seven hundred 
feet higher than Mount Washington, the highest peak 
east of the Rockies. From Summit to Truckee is four- 
teen miles and we coasted all the way, the rush of 
mountain air in our faces as we swept silently and 
smoothly down the long diagonals recalling the sensa- 
tion on the Cresta Run at Saint Moritz. Swinging sud- 
denly around a shoulder of the mountain at the "Three 
Miles to Truckee" sign, we found ourselves looking 
down upon a lake, a very gem of a lake, so scintillat- 
ingly blue amid the encircling forest that it looked like a 
sapphire set in jade. So smiling and pure and beau- 
tiful it was that it seemed impossible to associate it 
with the ghastliest and most revolting incident in 
Calif ornian history. Yet this was Donner Lake and 
those who have heard the terrible tale of the Donner 
party, for whom it was named, are not likely to forget 

233 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

it. A party of some eighty emigrants — men, women, 
and children — making their way to Cahfornia by the 
Overland route, and delayed by an ill-advised detour, 
reached the site of the present town of Truckee late 
in the autumn of 1846. While attempting to cross 
the pass a blinding snow-storm drove in upon them. 
The story of how the less robust members of the party 
died, one by one, from starvation, and of how the 
survivors were forced to eat the bodies of their dead 
comrades — Donner himself, it is claimed, subsisted 
on the remains of his grandmother; of the "Forlorn 
Hope" and of its desperate efforts to reach the settle- 
ments in the Sacramento Valley, in which only seven 
out of the twenty- two who composed it succeeded; 
of the successive relief expeditions sent out from Sut- 
ter's Fort; and of the final rescue in the spring of 1847 
of the pitiful handful of survivors, illustrates as nothing 
else can the incredible hardships and perils encountered 
by the American pioneers in their winning of the West. 
A grim touch of humour is lent to the tragedy by the 
fact that two Indians in charge of some cattle which 
Sutter had sent to them were killed and eaten by the 
starving emigrants, on the theory of the frontiersman, 
no doubt, that the only good Indian is a dead one. 
The hospitable Sutter, in a statement published some 
months later, complained most bitterly of this un- 
grateful act, saying that they were welcome to the 
cattle but that they were unjustified in depriving him 
of two perfectly good Indians. 

Truckee still bears all the earmarks of a fron- 
234 



THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 

tier town, for miners, cow-punchers, and lumbermen, 
bearded to the eyes, booted to the knees, and in several 
cases quite evidently loaded to the neck, lounged in 
the shade of the wooden awnings and swapped stories 
and spat tobacco juice as they waited for the train 
bringing the San Francisco papers to come in; while 
rows of saddle ponies, heads drooping and reins trail- 
ing in the dust, waited dejectedly at the edge of the 
raised wooden sidewalks for their masters. From 
Truckee to Tahoe our way led through the Truckee 
canon, running for a dozen miles or more so close to 
the banks of the sparkling, tumbling mountain river 
that we could have cast for the rainbow- trout we saw 
in it without having to leave the car. Dusk fell, and 
hard on its heels came its mother, the Dark, but still 
the yellow road, turned by the twin beams of the 
headlights to silver now, wound and turned and twisted 
interminably on, now swerving sharply as though 
frightened by the ghostliness of a thicket of white 
birches, then plimging confidently into the eerie dark- 
ness of a grove of fir-trees and emerging, all unexpect- 
edly, before a great, low, wide-spread building, its 
many windows ablaze with lights and its long veran- 
das outlined by hundreds and hundreds of scarlet 
paper lanterns. A wave of fragrance and music 
intermingled was wafted to us from where an orchestra 
was playing dreamy music in the rose gardens above 
the lake, whose silent, sombre waters reflected a lumi- 
nous summer moon. Music and moonlight I have 
known in many places — beneath the cypresses of 

235 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Lago Maggiore, along the Canale Grande, off the coasts 
of Africa, in the gardens of the Taj Mahal— but I 
have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, anything 
quite as beautiful as that first night on Tahoe, when 
the paper lanterns quivered in the night breeze, and 
the violins throbbed, oh, so softly, and the pale moon 
shone down upon the snow-capped mountains and 
they in turn were reflected dimly in the darkened 
waters of the lake. 



236 



IX 
THE INLAND EMPIRE 



"I watched the sun sink from the west, 

I watched the sweet day die; 
Above the dim Coast Range's crest 

I saw the red clouds he; 
I saw them lying golden deep, 

By hngering sunbeams kissed, 
Like isles of fairy-land that sleep 

In seas of amethyst. 
• •••■•••• 

"Then through the long night hours I lay 

In baflSed sleep's travail, 
And heard the outcast thieves in grey — 

The gaunt coyotes — wail. 
With seaward winds that wandering blew 

I heard the wild geese cry, 
I heard their grey wings beating through 

The star-dust of the sky. 

" Yet, with the last grim, solemn hour, 

Stilled were the voices all, 
And then, from poppied fields aflower, 

Rang out the wild bird's call; 
The glad dawn, deep in white mists steeped, 

Breathed on the day's hushed lyre, 
And far the dim Sierras leaped 

In living waves of fire." 



IX 

THE INLAND EMPIRE 

Along in January, after the holiday festivities 
-*- ^ are over, and the youngsters have gone back to 
school or college, and the Christmas presents have 
been paid for, Mr. American Business Man and his 
wife, to the number of many thousands, escape from 
the inclemency of an Eastern winter by "taking a 
run out to the coast." They usually choose one of 
the southern routes — the trip being prefaced by an 
animated family discussion as to whether they shall 
go via the Grand Canon or New Orleans — getting 
their first glimpse of the Golden State at San Diego. 
After taking a shivery dip in the breakers at Coronado 
so as to be able to write the folks back home that they 
have gone in bathing in midwinter, they continue 
their leisurely progress northward by the tahle-d'hote 
route, picking oranges at Riverside, taking the moun- 
tain railway up Mount Lowe from Pasadena, stopping 
off at Santa Barbara to see the mission and the homes 
of the millionaires at Montecito, playing golf and 
whirling round the Seventeen Mile Drive at Del 
Monte, visiting Chinatown, the Cliff House, and the 
Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and returning to the 
East in the early spring via Salt Lake City or the 

239 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"C. P. R.," having, as they fondly believe, seen pretty 
much everything in California worth the seeing. 

They turn their faces homeward utterly uncon- 
scious of the fact that they have only skirted along the 
fringe of the State; that of the great country at the 
back, which constitutes the real California, they have 
seen absolutely nothing. To them Sacramento, Stock- 
ton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lake Tahoe, the San 
Joaquin, the Big Trees, the Yosemite, the High Sierras 
are but names. They do not seem to appreciate, or 
it may be that they do not care, that the narrow 
coast zone dedicated to the amusement of the winter 
tourist is no more typical of California than the Riviera 
is typical of France. Though it is true that the Cali- 
fornian hinterland has no million-dollar "show places" 
and no huge hotels with tourists in white shoes and 
straw hats taking tea upon their terraces, it has other 
things which are more significant and more worth 
seeing. The visitor to the back country can see the 
orchards which supply the breakfast-tables of half the 
world with fruit and the vineyards which supply the 
dinner-tables of the other half with grapes and wine 
and raisins; he can see flocks of sheep so large that 
the hills on which they are grazing seem to be covered 
with snow; he can see oil-fields which produce enough 
petroleum to keep all the lamps in the world alight 
until the crack of doom. And, if this is not sufficient 
inducement, he can motor along the foot of the high- 
est mountain range in America, he can visit the most 
beautiful valley in all the world, he can picnic under 

240 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

the biggest trees in existence. A country of big things : 
big distances, big mountains, big trees, big ranches, 
big orchards, big crops, big pay, big problems — that's 
the hinterland of California. 

Now, that you may the more easily follow me in 
what I have to say, I will, with your permission, refer 
you to the map of the regions described in this volume. 
(See end of book.) 

The mountain systems, as you see, form a gigantic 
basin which comprises about three fifths of the total 
area of the State. The eastern rim of this basin is 
formed by the Sierra Nevada and the western rim by 
the Coast Range, these two coming together at the 
northern end of the basin in the great mountain wall 
which separates California from Oregon, while to the 
south they sweep inward in the form of a gigantic 
amphitheatre, being joined by a minor range known 
as the Tehachapis. Reaching Mexicoward is the 
continuation of the Coast system known as the San 
Bernardino Range, forming, as it were, a sort of handle 
to the basin. The only natural entrance to the basin 
is the Golden Gate, through which the two great river 
systems — the San Joaquin and Sacramento — reach the 
sea. Lying between the Coast Range and the Pacific 
is that narrow strip of pleasure land, with its orange 
groves, its silver beaches, its great hotels and splendid 
country houses, which is the beginning and end of 
California so far as the tourist is concerned. The 
northern part of the great basin, which is drained by 
the Sacramento River, is called the Sacramento Val- 

241 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

ley, while its southern two thirds, whose streams run 
into the San Joaquin River, is commonly known as 
"the San Joaquin," the whole forming the Great 
Valley of California. " Valley " is, however, a misnomer. 
One might as fittingly call Mount McKinley a hill, or 
Lake Superior a pond. It is a plain rather than a valley ; 
a plain upon whose level reaches Belgium would be 
lost and Holland could be tucked away in the corners. 
From the rampart of the Sierra Nevada on the east 
to the wall of the Coast Range on the west the rich 
brown loam has an average width of half a hundred 
miles. North and south it extends upward of four 
hundred miles — as far as from Pittsburg to Chicago. 
What Rhodesia is to South Africa, what its prairie 
provinces are to Canada, the Great Valley, with its 
millions of incredibly fertile acres, level as a floor and 
checker-boarded with alfalfa, fruit, and vine, is to 
California — the storehouse of the State. 

Before the railway builders came the Great Val- 
ley was one of the most important cattle-ranges in the 
West, and hundreds of thousands of longhorns grazed 
knee-deep in its lush grass. With the railway came the 
homesteaders, who, despite the threats of the cattle- 
men, drove their stakes and built their cabins and 
started to raise wheat. Then a dry year came, and on 
top of that another, a heart-breaking succession of them, 
and the ruined wheat growers sold out to the cattle 
barons. In such manner grew up the big ranches — 
holdings ranging all the way from ten thousand to half a 
million acres or more — a. few of which still remain intact. 

242 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

But a drought that will kill wheat will kill cattle, too, 
and after one terrible year a hundred thousand horned 
skeletons lay bleaching on the ranges. And so the 
cattlemen evacuated the valley in their turn and their 
places were taken by the diggers of ditches. Now the 
Lord evidently built the Great Valley to encourage 
irrigation. He filled it with rich, alluvial loam, tilted 
it ever so slightly toward the centre, brought innumer- 
able streams from the mountains and glaciers down 
to the edge of the plain, ordered the rain and the bliz- 
zard to stay away and the sun to work overtime. All 
this he did for the Great Valley, and the ditch did 
the rest — or, rather, the ditch allied to hard work, for 
without sweat-beaded brows, calloused hands, aching 
backs, the ditch is worthless. A social as well as an 
agricultural miracle was performed by the watering 
of the thirsty land. The great ranches were sub- 
divided into farms and orchards. Settlers came pour- 
ing in. Communities of hardy, industrious, energetic 
folk sprang up everywhere and these grew into vil- 
lages and the villages became towns and the towns 
expanded into cities. School beUs clanged their in- 
sistent summons to the youth of the countryside, 
church spires pointed their slender fingers toward the 
sky, highways stretched their length across the plain, 
and before this onset of civilisation the moral code of 
the frontier crumbled and gave way. The gun-fighter 
took French leave, the gambler silently decamped 
between two days, and in many communities the sa- 
loon-keeper tacked a "For Sale" sign on his door and 

243 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

took the north-bound train. Civihsation had come to 
the Great Valley, not with the dust of hoofs or beat 
of train, but with the gurgle of water in an irrigating 
ditch — and it had come to stay. 

Of the effect produced by this spreading of the 
waters we saw many evidences as we fled southward 
from Sacramento across the oak-studded plain. Throw- 
ing wide the throttle, the car leaped forward like a 
live thing. The oiled road slipped away from our 
wheels like an unwinding bolt of grey silk ribbon. The 
grain-fields were wide, the houses few. Constables 
there were none. Vineyards and orchards, trim rows 
of vegetables, neatly fenced farms alternated with 
seas of barley undulating in the wind. Such a country, 
however prosperous, offers little to detain a motorist, 
and we went booming southward at a gait that made 
the telegraph poles resemble the palings in a picket 
fence. Occasionally a torpedo-shaped electric car, a 
monstrous thing in a dull, hot red, the faces of its pas- 
sengers grotesquely framed by the circular portholes 
which serve as windows, tore past us with the wail of 
a lost soul. Whence it came or whither it went was a 
matter of small moment. 

The factory whistles were raucously reminding 
the workers that it was time to take the covers off 
their dinner pails when we swung into the plaza of 
the city whose name perpetuates the memory of the 
admiral who added California to the Union and drew 
up before the entrance of the Hotel Stockton. If you 
should chance to go there, don't let them persuade you 

244 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

into lunching in the restaurant with its fumed oak 
wainscotting and the Clydesdale furniture which ap- 
pears to be inseparable from the mission style of 
decoration, but insist on having a table set on the roof- 
garden with its vine-hung pergola and its ramparts 
of red geraniums. That was what we did, and the meal 
we had there, high above the city's bustle, became a 
white milestone on our highway of memories. Had it 
not been for the advertisements of chewing-gum and 
plug tobacco which stared at us from near-by hoard- 
ings, I would not have believed that we were in the 
United States at all, so different was the scene from my 
preconceived notions of the San Joaquin Valley. We 
might have been on the terrace of that quaint old 
hotel — I forget the name of it — that overlooks the 
Dam in Rotterdam. Stockton, you see, is at the head 
of navigation on the San Joaquin River, and the hotel 
stands at the head of one of the canal-like channels 
which permit of vessels tying up in the very heart of 
the city, so that from the terrace on its roof you look 
down on as animated and interesting a water scene as 
you will find anywhere: pompous, self-important tugs, 
launches with engines spluttering like angry washer- 
women, stern-wheel passenger steamers, little sisters 
of those upon the Mississippi, and cumbersome, slow- 
moving barges, their flat decks piled high with bagged 
or barrelled products of the valley on their way to 
San Francisco Harbour, there to be transshipped for 
strange and far-off ports. 

As a result of the Powers That Be at Washington 
245 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

having recently had a change of heart in respect to 
motor-cars entering the Yosemite, every valley town 
between Stockton and Visalia has announced itself 
as the one and only "official gateway to the valley/* 
and has backed up its claims with tons of maps and 
literature. As a matter of fact, the Department of 
the Interior has announced that motorists desiring to 
visit the Yosemite must enter and leave it by the 
Coulterville road, and this road can be reached from 
any one of half a dozen valley towns with equal facility. 
Coming, as we did, from the north, the most convenient 
route led through Modesto. As a result of the sudden 
prosperity produced by a modern version of the Mira- 
cle of Moses, water having been brought forth where 
there was no water before by a prophet's rod in the form 
of an irrigating ditch, the little town is as up to date 
as a girl just back from Paris. Its lawns and gardens 
have been Peter-Hendersonised until they look like 
the illustrations in a seedsman's catalogue; the archi- 
tecture of its schools and public buildings is so faithful 
an adaptation of the Spanish mission style that they 
would deceive old Padre Serra himself; and its roads 
would do credit to the genius of J. MacAdam. 

If you will set your travelling clock to awake you 
at the hour at which the servant-girl gets up to go to 
early mass you should, even allowing for the five-thou- 
sand-foot cHmb, reach Crocker's Sierra Resort, which 
is the nearest stopping place to that entrance of the 
Yosemite assigned to motorists, before the supper 
table is cleared off. It is necessary to spend the night 

246 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

at Crocker's, as the government regulations, which 
are far more inflexible than the Ten Commandments, 
permit motorists to enter the valley only between the 
hours of ten and one. Leaving Crocker's at a much 
more respectable hour than we did Modesto, we reached 
the first military outpost at Merced Big Tree Grove 
shortly before ten, where a very businesslike young 
cavalry officer put me through a catechism which made 
me feel like an immigrant applying for admission at 
Ellis Island. If your answers to the lieutenant's ques- 
tions correspond to those in the back of the book and 
your car is able to do the tricks required of it — to test 
the holding power of its brakes you are ordered to 
take a running start and then throw the brakes on so 
suddenly that the wheels skid — you are permitted 
the pleasure of paying five dollars for the privilege of 
entering the jealously guarded portals. They stamp 
your permit with the hour and minute at which you 
leave the big trees, and if you arrive at the next 
military post, which is nine miles distant, at the foot 
of the Merced River Canon, in a single second under 
an hour and seventeen minutes you are fined so heavily 
that you won't enjoy your visit. I remember that we 
sneered at these regulations as being unnecessary and 
absurd — but that was before we had seen the Merced 
Cafion grade. As my chauffeur remarked, it is a real 
hum-dinger. It is nothing more or less than a narrow 
shelf chopped out of the face of the clijBf. 

"I wonder if those soldiers were quite as careful 
in examining our brakes as they should have been?" 

247 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

anxiously remarked one of my companions, glancing 
over the side of the car into the dizzy gorge below and 
then looking hurriedly away again. 

" Oh, there are some perfectly lovely wild flowers ! " 
suddenly exclaimed the Lady, who had been choking 
the life out of the cushions. "If you don't mind I'll 
get out and pick them . . . and please don't wait for 
me, I'll walk the rest of the way down. Yes, indeed, 
I'm very fond of walking." 

It is only fair to warn those who propose to follow 
in our tire tracks that, entering the Yosemite by auto- 
mobile, you do not get one of those sudden and over- 
whelming views which cause the beholder to ''O-o-o- 
oh-h-h-h-h !" and " A-a-a-ah-h-h-h-h ! " like the exhaust 
of a steam-engine. On the contrary, you sneak into the 
famous valley very unostentatiously indeed, along a 
winding wood road which might be in New England. 
Nor are you permitted to tear about the floor of the 
valley whither you list, for no sooner do you reach the 
Sentinel Hotel than a khaki-clad trooper steps up and 
orders you to put your car in the garage and keep it 
there until you are ready to leave. 

The Yosemite is not, properly speaking, a valley. 
That word suggests a gentle depression with sloping 
sides, a sort of hollow in the hills, which have been 
moulded by the fingers of ages into flowing and com- 
plaisant lines. The Yosemite is nothing of the sort. 
It is a great cleft or chasm, hemmed in by rocky walls 
as steep as the prices at a summer hotel and as smooth 
as the manners of a confidence man. It is the exact 

248 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

reverse of that formation so characteristic of the South- 
west known as a mesa: it is a precipice- walled plain. 
One might imagine it to be the work of some exasperated 
Titan who, peeved at finding the barrier of the Sierras 
in his path, had driven his spade deep into the ridge of 
the range and then moved it back and forth, as a gar- 
dener does in setting out a plant, leaving a gash in the 
mountains eight miles long and a mile deep. When 
flocks of wild geese light in the Yosemite, so John 
Muir tells us, they have hard work to find their way 
out again, for, no matter in which direction they turn, 
they are soon stopped by the wall, the height of which 
they seem to have an insuperable difficulty in gauging. 
They must feel very much like a fish in an aquarium 
which is for ever battering its nose against the glass 
walls of its tank. The wall looks to be only about so 
high, but when they should be far over its top, north- 
ward or southward according to the season, back they 
find themselves once more, beating against its stony 
face, and it is only when, in their bewilderment, they 
chance to follow the downward course of the river, 
that they hit upon an exit. 

Standing in the centre of the valley floor, on the 
banks of the winding Merced, is the Sentinel Hotel, 
which, barring several camps, is the only hostelry in 
the valley. It is a cosy, homelike, old-fashioned place, 
the fashion in which the rooms open onto the broad 
verandas which run entirely around both the lower 
and the upper stories recalling the old-time taverns 
of the South. As there are neither dance pavilions 

249 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

nor moving-picture houses in the Yosemite, the young 
women employed as waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel 
frequently find their unoccupied time hanging heavy 
on their hands, this tedium occasionally leading them 
into exploits calculated to make the hair of the observer 
permanently pompadour. One of these girls, a slender, 
willowy creature, anxious to outdare her companions, 
climbed to Glacier Point and on the insecure and 
scanty foothold afforded by the Overhanging Rock, 
which juts from the face of the sheer cliff, three thou- 
sand two hundred feet above the valley floor, proceeded 
to dance the tango ! Evidently feeling that this exhi- 
bition, which had sent chills of apprehension up the 
spines of the beholders, was too tame, she balanced 
herself on one foot on the ledge's very brink and ex- 
tended the other, like a premiere danseuse, over three 
fifths of a mile of emptiness. 

An unobtrusive but interesting feature of the 
Yosemite which may well escape the notice of the 
casual tourist is the little settlement of Indians, who 
dwell in a collection of wretched shacks at the base 
of the valley's northern wall. Like all the California 
Indians, this remnant of the Yosemite tribe are entirely 
lacking in the picturesqueness of dress and bearing 
which characterises their kinsmen of the Southwest. 
Their presence in the Yosemite possesses, however, a 
certain romantic interest, for, had it not been for them, 
it may well be that the famous valley would still re- 
main unfound. Their story is an interesting and 
pathetic one. As a result of the injustices and out- 

250 




THE YOSEMITE— AND A LADY WHO DIDN'T KNOW FEAR. 

"She balanced herself on one foot on the ledge's very brink and extended the other, 
like a premiere danseuse, over three fifths of a mile of emptiness. 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

rages committed upon the peaceful Californian In- 
dians by the settlers who came flocking into the State 
upon the discovery of gold, the tribes were driven to 
revolt, and in 185 1 the government found itself with a 
"little war" upon its hands. The trouble ended, of 
course, by the complete subjugation of the Indians, 
who were transferred from their hereditary homes to 
a reservation near Fresno. The Yosemites proved less 
tractable than the other tribes, however, and, instead 
of coming in and surrendering to the palefaces, they 
retreated to their fastnesses in the High Sierras, and 
it was while pursuing them that a troop of cavalry 
discovered the enchanted valley which bears their 
name. They were captured and carried to Fresno, 
but the humid climate of the lowlands wrought such 
havoc among these mountain-bred folk that the sur- 
vivors petitioned the government for permission to 
return to their old home. Their petition was granted, 
and during the half century which has passed since 
their return to the valley which was the cradle of their 
race they have never molested the white man and 
have supported themselves by such work as the valley 
affords and by basket weaving. 

It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these 
copper-coloured stragglers from another era. While 
riding one afternoon along the foot of the sheer preci- 
pice which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by 
three strange objects standing in a row. They resem- 
bled — as much as they resembled anything — West Afri- 
can voodoo priests in the thatched garments which 

251 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

they wear on ceremonial occasions. Upon questioning 
the Indian woman who appeared, however, I eHcited 
the information that they were chuck-ahs, and were 
built to store acorns in. The Yosemite chuck-ah 
looks like a huge edition of the hampers they use in 
the lavatories of hotels to throw soiled towels in, 
thatched with fir branches and twigs, covered with a 
square of canvas to shed the rain, and mounted on 
stilts so as to place its contents beyond the reach of 
rodents. As the Yosemites, who are bitterly poor, 
largely subsist upon a coarse bread made from meal 
produced by pounding the bitter acorn, the chuck-ah 
is as essential to their scheme of household economy 
as a flour barrel is to ours. The copper-coloured lady 
who painstakingly explained all this to me in very dis- 
connected English told me that her name was Wilson's 
Lucy. Whether she was married to Wilson or whether 
she was merely attached, like her name, I did not 
inquire. Flattered by my obvious interest in her do- 
mestic affairs, she disappeared into the miserable hut 
which served as home, to reappear an instant later 
carrying what at first glance I took for a small-sized 
mummy, but which, upon closer inspection, proved to 
be a very black-haired, very bright-eyed, very lusty 
youngster, bound to a board from chin to ankle with 
linen bandages which served the double purpose of 
making him straight of body and keeping him out 
of mischief. 

"What's his name?" I inquired, proffering a piece 
of silver. 

252 




In midwinter, when the Yosemite is deep in snow, skis and sledges provide the only means of 
giving the baby an airing. 




'What's his name?" I inquired. The mother giggled proudly: "He name Woodrow Wilson.'' 
YOSEMITE YOUNGSTERS, WHITE AND RED. 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

"My name Wilson's Lucy," the mother giggled 
proudly. "He name Woodrow Wilson." 

So, should the President see fit to present a silver 
spoon to his copper-coloured namesake, he can address 
it care of Yosemite Valley Post-Office, California. 

Of the Yosemite, Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose 
red guide-books every travelling American clings as 
tenaciously as to his letter of credit, and whose opinions 
he accepts as unreservedly as a Mohammedan accepts 
the Koran, has said: "No single valley in Switzerland 
combines in so limited a space such a wonderful variety 
of grand and romantic scenery." Aside from its unique 
scenic beauties, the chief attraction of the Yosemite, 
to my way of thinking, is the altogether unusual vari- 
ety of recreation which it affords. Excursions afoot, 
ahorseback, or acarriage to a dozen points of charm 
in the valley and its environs; trail rides along the 
dizzy paths which the government has built to skirt 
the canon's rim; fishing in the icy mountain streams, 
in whose shaded pools half a dozen varieties of trout — 
Steelheads, Speckled, Brook, Rainbow, Dolly Varden, 
and others — await the fly; al fresco luncheons in the 
leafy recesses of the Happy Isles, with the pine-car- 
peted earth for a seat, a moss-covered boulder for a 
table, and the mingled murmur of waterfalls and wind- 
stirred tree tops for music; it is days spent in such 
fashion which makes of a visit to the Yosemite an 
unforgetable memory. 

A half-day's journey south by stage from the Yo- 
253 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Semite brings one to the lovely Sierran meadow of 
Wawona, above which are marshalled that glorious 
company of Sequoias known as the Mariposa Big Tree 
Grove. Just as Ireland has its lakes, and Switzerland 
its mountains, and Norway its fiords, so California has 
its Sequoias, and in many respects they are the most 
wonderful of all. The Big Trees, as they are called, 
are of two genera: the Sequoia gigantea, found only 
in the lower ranges of the high Sierras, and the Sequoia 
sempervirens, which are peculiar to the region lying 
between the Coast Range and the sea. There is no 
more fascinating trip on the continent than that from 
the Yosemite to the Big Trees of Mariposa, the road, 
which in the course of a few miles attains an elevation 
of six thousand five hundred feet, commanding magnifi- 
cent retrospects of the Bridal Veil Falls, El Capitan, 
Cathedral Spires, and Half Dome, then plunging into 
the depths of a forest of cedar, fir, and pine, crossing 
the south fork of the brawling Merced, passing the 
hospitable verandas of the Wawona Hotel, and ending 
under the shadow of the redwood giants, traversing, 
en route, a tunnel cut through the heart of a living 
Sequoia. In their exploitation of the Big Tree groves, 
the railway companies have had the rather question- 
able taste to advertise these monarchs of the forest 
by means of pictures showing six-horse coaches being 
driven through them, or troops of cavalry aligned 
upon their prostrate trunks, or good-looking young 
women on horseback giving equestrian exhibitions 
upon their stumps. To me this sort of thing smacks 

254 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

too much of the professional showman; it is like making 
a Bengal tiger jump through a paper hoop or a lion sit 
up on his hind legs and beg like a trick dog. The 
Sequoias are too magnificent, too awesome to thus 
cheapen. When once you have stood in their solemn 
presence and have attempted to follow with your eye 
the course of the great trunks soaring skyward, higher 
than the Flatiron Building in New York, half again 
the height of the shaft on Bunker Hill; when you have 
made the circuit of their massive trunks, equal in cir- 
cumference to the spires of Notre Dame; when you 
have examined their bark, thicker than the armour of 
the dreadnought Texas; you will agree with me, I 
think, that the Big Trees of California need no circus 
performances to emphasise their proportions and 
their majesty. 

According to the rules promulgated by the gov- 
ernment, motorists are permitted to leave the Yosemite 
only between the hours of six and seven-thirty in the 
morning. After I had crawled out of a warm bed into 
the shiveryness of a Sierran dawn — for the early morn- 
ings are bitterly cold in the High Sierras — I felt in- 
clined to agree with Madame de Pompadour that 
"travelling is the saddest of all pleasures." But when 
we were sandwiched in the tonneau of the car again, 
with the long and trying grade by which we had 
entered the valley safely behind us and the river road 
to Merced stretching out in long diagonals in front, 
we soon forgot the discomforts of the early rising, for 
the big car leaped forward like a spirited horse turned 

255 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

loose upon the countryside, and the crisp, clear air 
dashed itself into our faces until we felt as buoyant and 
exhilarated as though we had been drinking champagne. 
After "checking out" at the Big Tree military outpost, 
we turned down the road which leads through Coul- 
terville to Merced, the walls of the canon gradually 
becoming less precipitous and the rugged character of 
the country merging into orchards and these in turn 
to farms and vineyards as we debouched into the San 
Joaquin again. 

Leaving Merced in the golden haze behind us, 
we swung southward, through the land of port wine 
and sherry, to Madera, the birthplace of the American 
raisin, and so down the splendid Kearney Boulevard — 
fifteen miles of oiled dehght running between hedges 
of palms and oleanders — to Fresno, the geographical 
centre of California and the home of the American 
raisin and sweet-wine industry, which in little more 
than a dozen years has elbowed Spain out of first 
place among the raisin growers of the world and has 
caused ten thousand homes to spring up out on the 
sandy plain. Unleashing the power beneath the throb- 
bing bonnet, we tore southward and ever southward, 
at first through growing grain-fields and then across 
vast barren stretches, waiting patiently for reclama- 
tion. Draped along the scalloped base of the moleskin- 
coloured foot-hills, where they rise abruptly from the 
plain, was a bright green ribbon — the citrus belt of 
the San Joaquin, where the orange groves nestle in 
the sheltered coves formed by the Sierras' projecting 

256 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

spurs. In the region lying between Visalia and Porter- 
ville frost is an almost negligible quantity and, as a 
result, it is threatening the supremacy of the Riverside- 
Pasadena district as a producer of the golden fruit. 

Visalia is the starting-point for the Sequoia and 
General Grant Big Tree Groves, which have recently 
been opened to automobilists. The route to the 
Sequoia Park lies through Lemon Cove and then over 
a moderately good road, extremely dusty in summer, 
to Rocky Gulch, on the Giant Forest Road, where 
the motorist is halted by a cavalry patrol and the 
customary five-dollar admittance fee to national parks 
exacted. From Visalia to Camp Sierra, in the heart 
of the Sequoia, is fifty-five miles, to cover which, 
allowing for the mountain grades, the indififerent con- 
dition of the roads, and the delay at the park boundary, 
will require a full half day. The monarch of the Se- 
quoia Grove is the redwood known as "General Sher- 
man," two hundred and eighty feet in height and ninety- 
five feet in circumference. Taking height and girth 
together, the "General Sherman" is, I believe, the 
largest tree in the world, though in the little-visited 
Calaveras Grove, the northernmost of the Californian 
groups of big trees, the "Mother of the Forest" is 
three hundred and fifteen feet high and the prostrate 
"Father of the Forest" is one hundred and twelve 
feet in circumference. If, however, the size of a tree 
is gauged by its girth only, there are several trees larger 
than any of the CaHfornian Sequoias — the gigantic 
cypress near Oaxaca, in Mexico, known as the "Great 

257 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Tree of Tule," whose trunk measures one hundred and 
sixty feet in circumference but whose height is barely 
more; the great banyan in the botanical garden at 
Calcutta, and the "Chestnut Tree of a Hundred 
Horses" — said to be the largest tree in the world — ^at 
the foot of Mount Etna. I do not know whether these 
bald figures convey anything to you, but they certainly 
do not to me and I am not going to burden you with 
more of them. I have done my duty in giving you 
the dimensions of the largest of the Sequoias, which, 
I might add, is almost the exact height of the Flatiron 
Building. A vast deal of nonsense has been written 
about the age and other features of the Californian 
redwoods. It is not enough for the visitor to learn 
that the oldest Sequoia was probably a sapling when 
Rameses drove the Israelites out of Egypt, but the 
guide must needs draw upon his imagination and add 
another six or seven thousand years on top of that. 
The Sequoia, the noblest living thing upon our conti- 
nent to-day, would appear, even at the age of five-and- 
twenty centuries, to be capable of much added lustre, 
for I was gravely assured that it was probably from 
these very groves that Solomon obtained the pillars 
for his temple. 

It is in the neighbourhood of fourscore miles from 
Visalia to the delta of the Kern, most southerly of the 
Sierra's golden streams, along whose banks rise the 
gaunt, black skeletons of the oil-derricks. So vast is 
the extent of the Great Valley of California that, 
though it contains the greatest petroleum fields in all 

258 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

the world, the traveller may zigzag through it for many 
days without seeing a sign of the industry which lights 
the lamps and provides the motive power for trains, 
boats, and motor-cars from the Straits of Behring to 
the Straits of Magellan. It is not an attractive region. 
Hungry and bare are the tawny hills, viscous the 
waters of the stream that meanders between them, 
weird and gibbet-like the forest of derricks which 
crowns them. There is a smell of coal-oil in the air, 
and the few habitations we passed were, by their very 
ugliness, obviously connected with this, the unloveliest 
of the earth's products. 

Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great 
Valley, a few miles south of it the converging ranges 
of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the Tehachapi, 
which is the recognised boundary between central and 
southern California. Bakersfield owes its abounding 
prosperity to the adjacent oil-fields, its streets being 
lined by the florid residences and its highways resound- 
ing to the arrogant honk honk of the high-powered 
motor-cars of the "oil barons," as the men who have 
"struck oil" are termed. I like these oil barons be- 
cause with their loud voices and their boisterous 
manners and the picturesqueness of their dress they 
typify a phase of life in the "Last West" which is 
rapidly disappearing. There is something rough-and- 
ready and romantic about them; something which 
recalls their get-rich-quick fellows in Dawson and 
Johannesburg and Baku. Most of them have acquired 
their wealth suddenly; most of them have worked up 

259 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

from the humblest beginnings; and most of them be- 
lieve in the good old proverb of "Easy come, easy go — 
for there's more where this came from." Red-faced, 
loud-voiced, with a predilection for broad-brimmed 
hats and gaudy ties, you can see them playing poker 
for high stakes in the back rooms of the saloons or 
leaning over the hotel bars in boisterous conversation. 
After I had watched them for a time I no longer doubted 
the assertion that Bakersfield buys more spittoons 
than any city in the country. 

Although from the gilded cupola of Bakersfield's 
truly beautiful court-house you can look out across a 
quarter of a million irrigated acres, though you can see 
a solid block of alfalfa covering forty squares miles 
and fattening twenty-five thousand head of steers a 
year, these form but a patch of green on the yellow 
floor of the valley's gigantic amphitheatre. As a 
matter of fact, the development of the country around 
Bakersfield has been seriously retarded by the enormous 
holdings of two or three great landowners who neither 
improve their properties nor sell them. One of these 
great landlords, who numbers his Californian acres 
alone in the millions and who boasts that his cow- 
punchers can drive a herd of his steers from the Mexi- 
can frontier to the Oregon line and camp on his own 
land every night, obtained his enormous holdings near 
Bakersfield long years ago under the terms of the 
Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, which pfbvided that 
any one who applied could obtain title to any land 
which he had gone over in a boat. So he put a boat on 

260 




A "gusher" near Bakersfield spouting two and a half million gallons of oil a day. 




The Kern River oil fields, near Bakersfield, Cal. 
THE GREATEST OIL FIELDS IN THE WORLD. 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

a wagon and had it hauled over hundreds of thousands 
of acres which he has since reclaimed. He was an 
ingenious fellow. 

You will need to journey far to find a region more 
desolate and forbidding than that lying between Ba- 
kersfield and the summit of the Tehachapi. Never 
shall I forget the deadly monotony of that long, straight 
road along which we pushed in the teeth of a buffeting 
wind, with its whistling telegraph-poles, its creaking 
iron windmills at regular intervals, and its barbed- wire 
fences all converging to a vanishing-point which looked 
to be perhaps five miles ahead but at which we never 
seemed to arrive. There are no trees to obstruct the 
view of the barren hills which rim the distance, and for 
many miles there is not enough cover to hide a grass- 
hopper, for the soil is poisoned by alkalis and the poor, 
thin grass dies of a broken heart. But as the car panted 
its tortuous way from the floor of the valley up the face 
of the mountain wall which hems it in, the scenery 
became more varied and interesting. Great patches 
of the mountainside were clothed with masses of lupin 
of the coldest, brightest blue you ever saw. Once we 
ran through a forest of tree yuccas whose spiked, 
fantastic branches looked as though they were laden 
with hedgehogs. Sometimes the road would dip quite 
suddenly into a charming little hollow in the hills, 
shaded by venerable live-oaks and with a purling brook 
running through it, only to emerge again and zigzag 
along the face of the mountain, clinging to the bare 
rock as a fly clings to the ceiling. Several times we 

261 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

had to stop for flocks of sheep — thousands and thou- 
sands of them — moving to pastures new, driven by- 
shaggy, bright-eyed sheep-dogs which hung upon the 
flanks of the flock and seemed to anticipate every 
order of the Basque shepherds. I noticed that all 
these herdsmen wore heavy revolvers at their hips and 
had Winchesters slung at the pommels of their saddles, 
for the ancient feud between cattlemen and sheepmen 
still exists upon these Sierran ranges, and there is many 
a pitched battle between them of which no news creeps 
into the columns of the papers. The frequency of 
these flocks considerably delayed our progress, for the 
road is narrow and to have driven through the woolly 
wave which at times engulfed the car would have 
meant driving scores of sheep over the precipice to 
death on the rocks below. 

The change in scenery as we emerged from the 
mouth of the pass at Saugus was almost startling in 
its suddenness. Gone were the dreary, wind-swept 
plains; gone was the endless vista of telegraph-poles; 
gone the dun and desolate hills. We found ourselves, 
instead, at the entrance to a valley which might well 
have been the place of exile of Persephone. Symmet- 
rical squares of bay-green oranges, of soft gray olives 
and of yellowing vines turned its slopes into chess- 
boards of striking verdure. Rows of taU, straight 
eucalyptus trees made of the highway a tunnel of 
blue-green foliage. The mountains, from foot to sum- 
mit, were clothed with lupins of a blue that dulled the 
blue of heaven. The oleanders and magnolias and 

262 




"We ran through a forest of tree-yuccas whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they 
were laden with hedgehogs." 




"Our progress was frequently delayed by woolly waves which at times engulfed the car." 
OVER THE TEHACHAPIS. 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

palms and clumps of bamboo about the ranches gave 
to the scene an almost tropical luxuriance. This was 
the vale of Santa Clara — not to be confused with the 
valley of the same name farther north — perhaps the 
richest and most prosperous agricultural region for 
its size between the oceans and certainly the least 
advertised and the least known. Unlike the residents 
of other parts of California, its residents issue no en- 
ticing literature depicting the surpassing beauties and 
attractions of their valley as a place of residence, for 
the very good reason that they do not care to sell, 
unless at prohibitive prices. They have a good thing 
and they intend to keep it. Less than twoscore miles 
in length, the Santa Clara Valley, which begins at 
Saugus and runs westward to Ventura-by-the-Sea, 
comes nearer to being frostless than any region in the 
State, save only the Imperial Valley. But its indus- 
tries are by no means restricted to the cultivation of 
citrus fruits, for the walnuts it produces are finer than 
those of England, its figs are larger than those of 
Smyrna, and its olives more succulent than those grown 
on the hills of Greece. 

As with engines droning like giant bumblebees we 
sped down the eucalyptus-bordered highway which 
leads to Santa Paula, the valley was flooded with the 
rare beauty of the fleeting twilight of the West. The 
sky, a moment before a dome of lapis lazuli, merged 
into that exquisite ashes-of-roses tint which is the 
foremost precursor of the dark, and then burst, all 
unexpectedly, into a splendid fiery glow which turned 

263 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the western heavens into a sheet of rosy coral. But, 
like most really beautiful things, the Californian sun- 
sets are quick to perish. A few moments only and the 
rose had dulled to palest lavender and this to amethyst 
and this in turn to purple and then, at one bound, 
came the night, and our head lamps were boring twin 
holes in the velvety, flower-scented darkness. Before 
us the street lights of Santa Paula burst into flame 
like a diamond necklace clasped about the neck of a 
lovely woman. 

The region of which Lake Tahoe is the centre is 
difficult to describe; one is drawn illusively into over- 
praising it. Yet everything about it — the height of the 
surrounding mountains, the vastness of the forests, 
the size of the trees, the beauty of the wild flowers, 
the grandeur of the scenery, the colourings of the lake 
itself — ^is so superlative that, to describe it as it really 
is, one must, perforce, lay himself open to the charge 
of exaggeration. There is no lake in Switzerland or, 
for that matter, anywhere else in Europe which is 
Tahoe's equal. To find its peer you will need to go to 
Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, or, better still, 
to some of the mountain lakes of Kashmir. Here, set 
down on the very ridge-pole of the High Sierras, is a 
lake twenty-two miles long by ten in width, the innu- 
merable pleasure craft whose propellers churn its 
translucent waters into opaline and amaranthine hues 
being nearly a mile and a quarter above the surface 
of the Pacific. To attempt to describe its ever-chang- 

264 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

ing and elusive colourings is as futile as to describe the 
colours of a sunset sky, of a peacock's tail, of an opal. 
Looked at from one point, it is blue — the blue of an 
iEgean sky, of a baby's eyes, of a turquoise or of a 
sapphire — ^but an hour later, or from another angle, 
it will be green: a gorgeous, glorious, dazzling green, 
sometimes scintillating like an emerald of incredible 
size, sometimes lustreless as a piece of jade. In the 
bays and coves and inlets which corrugate its shores 
its waters become even more diverse in colouring: 
smoke grey, pearl grey, bottle green, Nile green, yes, 
even apple green, lavender, amethyst, violet, purple, 
indigo, and — ^believe me or not, as you choose — I have 
more than once seen Tahoe so rosy in the reflected 
alpenglow of twilight that it looked for all the world 
like a sheet of pinkest coral. Its shores are as diverse 
as its colourings, pebbly beaches alternating with 
emerald bays; pine-crowned promontories; snug coves 
on whose silver beaches bathers disport themselves 
and children gambol; moss-carpeted banks shaded by 
centenarian trees; cliffs, smooth as the side of a house, 
rising a thousand feet sheer above the water; and, 
here and there, deep and narrow inlets so hemmed in 
by vertical precipices of rock that to find their like you 
would have to go to the Norwegian fiords. Completely 
encircling the lake, like watchful sentinels, rise the 
snow peaks — ^not the domesticated mountains of the 
Adirondacks or the Alleghenies, but towering mon- 
sters, ten, twelve, fifteen thousand feet in height and 
white-mantled throughout the year — the monarchs of 

265 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the High Sierras. From the snow-line, which is gen- 
erally about two thousand feet above the surface of 
the lake and ten thousand feet above the level of the 
sea, the coniferous Sierran forests — the grandest and 
most beautiful in the world — clothe the lower slopes 
of the mountains in mantles of shaggy green which 
sweep downward until their hems are wet in the waters 
of the lake. 

One of the most distinguishing and pleasing char- 
acteristics of these Sierran forests is their inviting 
openness. The trees of all the species stand more or 
less apart in groves or in small, irregular groups, en- 
abling a rider to make his way almost anywhere, along 
sun-bathed colonnades and through lush, green glades, 
sprinkled with wild flowers and as smooth as the lawns 
of a city park. Now you cross a forest garden ariot 
with wild flowers, now a mountain meadow, now a 
fern-banked, willow-shaded stream, and ever and anon 
emerge upon some granite pavement or high, bare 
ridge commanding superb views of majestic snow- 
peaks rising grandly above the intervening sea of ever- 
green. Every now and then you stumble upon moun- 
tain lakes tucked away in the most unexpected places, 
gleaming amid the surrounding forest like sapphires 
which a jeweller has laid out for inspection upon a 
green plush cloth. The whole number of lakes in the 
Sierras is said to be upward of fifteen hundred, not 
counting the innumerable smaller pools and tarns. 
Another feature of the High Sierras are the glacier 
meadows: smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded 

266 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

in the upper forests, on the floors of the valleys, and 
along the broad backs of the ridges at a height of from 
eight to ten thousand feet above the sea. These moun- 
tain meadows are nearly as level as the lakes whose 
places they have taken and present a dry, even surface, 
free from boulders, bogs, and weeds. As one suddenly 
emerges from the solemn twilight of the forest into 
one of these dreamy, sunlit glades, he looks instinc- 
tively for the dainty figures of Watteau shepherdesses 
or for the slender forms of sportive nymphs. The close, 
fine sod is so brightly enamelled with flowers and but- 
terflies that it may well be called a meadow garden, for 
in many places the plushy turf is so thickly strewn with 
gentians, daisies, ivesias, forget-me-nots, wild honey- 
suckle, and paint-brush that the grass can scarcely 
be seen. 

In certain of these mountain meadows I noticed a 
phenomenon which I have observed nowhere else save 
in Morocco: the flowers, instead of being mixed and 
mingled in a huge bouquet, grew in distinct but adja- 
cent patches — a square of blue forget-me-nots here, a 
blanket of white daisies there, a strip of Indian paint- 
brush over there, and beyond a dense clump of wild 
lilac — so that from a little distance the meadow looked 
exactly like a great floral mosaic. It was very beautiful. 
On the higher slopes the scarlet shoots of the snow- 
plant dart from the soil like tongues of flame. Around 
it hangs a pretty native legend. Two young braves, 
so the legend runs, made desperate love to an Indian 
princess, who at length chose the one and turned away 

267 



THE END OF THE TRAH. 

the other. On the marriage day the rejected lover 
ambushed himself in the forest, and, as his rival went 
riding past to claim his bride, sent an arrow twanging 
into his breast. But, though wounded unto death, the 
lover clung to his horse and raced through the forest 
to die in the arms of his bride. As he sped his heart's 
blood, welling forth, left a trail of crimson splotches 
on the ground behind him. And wherever a drop of 
blood fell, there a blood-red flower sprang into bloom. 
If you doubt the story you can see and pick them for 
yourself. 

Set high on the western shore of Tahoe, and so 
appropriately designed that it seems to be a part of 
the forest which encircles it, is Tahoe Tavern — a long, 
low hostelry of shingles, stone, and logs, its deep ve- 
randas commanding an entrancing view of the lake 
and of the mountainous Nevada shore, for the Cali- 
fornia-Nevada boundary runs down the middle of the 
lake. Just as the smart set along the Atlantic seaboard 
flock to Newport, Narragansett, and Bar Harbour in 
the summer, so the corresponding section of society 
upon the Pacific Coast may be found at Tahoe from 
July to September. A narrow-gauge railway, leaving 
the main line of the Southern Pacific at Truckee, two 
hundred miles or so east of San Francisco, hugs the 
brawling Truckee to the Tavern, a distance of a dozen 
miles, whence steamers convey the visitor to the 
numerous hotels, camps, and cottages which dot the 
shores of the lake. The summers are never warm on 
Tahoe, nor, for that matter, ever uncomfortably cool, 

268 



THE INLAND EMPIRE 

while the air is as crisp and invigorating as extra-dry 
champagne. From the first of July to the first of 
October it almost never rains. And yet ninety-nine 
Easterners out of a hundred pity the poor Californians 
who, they imagine, are sweltering in semitropic heat. 
One never lacks for amusement at Tahoe. Lean 
power-boats tear madly from shore to shore, their 
knife-hke prows ploughing the lake into a creamy 
furrow. Hydroplanes hurtle by like leaping tunas. 
There is angling both in Tahoe and the maze of ad- 
jacent lakes and lakelets for every variety of trout that 
swims. There is bathing — if one doesn't mind cold 
water. At night white-shouldered women and white- 
shirted men dip and hesitate and glide on the casino's 
glassy floor to the impassioned strains of " Get Out and 
Get Under" and "Too Much Mustard." But trail 
riding is the most characteristic as it is the most excit- 
ing, diversion of them all. It is really mountaineering 
on horseback — up the forested slopes, across the gaunt, 
bare ridges, and so to the icy summits, on wiry ponies 
which are as sure-footed as mountain-goats and as act- 
ive as back-yard cats. The narrowness of many of the 
trails, the shpperiness of ice and snow, the giddiness of 
the sheer cliffs, the thought of what would happen if 
your horse should stumble, combine to make it an 
exciting amusement. You can leave the shores of the 
lake, basking in a summer climate, with flowers bloom- 
ing everywhere, and in a two hours' ride find yourself 
amid perpetual snow. It is a novel experience, this 
sudden transition from July to January, and not to be 

269 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

obtained so readily anywhere else that I know, unless 
it be in a cold-storage plant. On the Fourth of July, 
for example, after a late breakfast, the Lady and I 
waved au revoir to our white-flannelled friends on the 
Tavern's veranda and before noon were pelting each 
other with snowballs on a snow-drift forty feet deep, 
with Lake Tahoe, gleaming beneath the sun like a gi- 
gantic opal, three thousand feet below us. There may, 
of course, be more enchanting vacation places than 
this Tahoe country — higher mountains, grander forests, 
more beautiful lakes, a better climate — but I do not 
know where to find them. 



270 



X 

"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 



"I hear the far-off voyager's horn; 
I see the Yankee's trail — 
His foot on every mountain pass, 
On every stream his sail. 

"I hear the mattock in the mine, 
The axe stroke in the dell, 
The clamour from the Indian lodge, 
The Jesuit chapel bell ! 

"I see the swarthy trappers come 
From Mississippi's springs; 
And war-chiefs with their painted brows 
And crests of eagle wings. 

"Behind the scared squaw's birch canoe 
The steamer smokes and raves; 
And city lots are staked for sale 
Above old Indian graves. 

" Each rude and jostling fragment soon 
Its fitting place shall find — 
The raw material of a State, 
Its muscle and its mind." 



X 

"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

WITH a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of 
hoofs the coach bore down upon us, its yellow 
body swaying drunkenly upon its leathern springs. It 
was a welcome sight, for since early morning we had 
been journeying through a region sans sign-posts, sans 
houses, sans people, sans everything. I threw up my 
hand, palm outward, which is the recognised halt 
sign of the plains, and in obedience to the signal the 
sombreroed driver pulled his wheelers back on their 
haunches and jammed his brakes on hard. Half a 
dozen bearded faces peered from the dim interior of 
the vehicle to ascertain the reason for the sudden 
stop. 

"Are we right for the Columbia?" I asked. 

"You betcha, friend," said the driver, squirting a 
jet of tobacco juice with great dexterity between the 
portals of his drooping moustache. "All yeVe got to 
do is keep 'er headed north an' keep agoin'. You're 
not more nor sixty mile from the river now. How 
fur've ye come with that there machine, anyway?" 

"From Mexico," I replied a trifle proudly. 

"The hell you say !" he responded with open ad- 
273 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

miration. "An' where ye bound fur, ef I might make 
so hold's to ask ? " 

"As far north as we can get," I answered. "To 
Alaska, if the roads hold out." 

"Waal, don't it beat the Dutch what things is 
acomin' to anyway," he ejaculated, "when ye kin git 
into a waggin like that there an' scoot acrost the coun- 
try same's ye would on a railroad train? I've druv 
this old stage forty year come next December, but the 
next thing ye know they'll be wantin' an autermobile, 
an' me an' the critters'll be lookin' fer another job. 
But that's progress, an' 'tain't no manner o' use tryin' 
to buck it. These old Concords hev done a heap to- 
ward civilisin' the West, but their day's about over, I 
reckon, an' the autermobile will come along an' take 
up the job where they left off. Come to think on it, 
it's sorter 's if the old style was shakin' hands an' sayin', 
'Glad tew meet you' to the new. But I've got your 
Uncle Sam'l's mail to deliver an' I can't be hangin' 
'round here gossipin' all day." 

He kicked off his brake, and his long whip-lash, 
leaping forward Hke a rattlesnake, cracked between 
the ears of his leaders. "Get to work there, ye lazy, 
good-fer-nothin' sons o' sea-cooks, you!" he bellowed. 

"S'long, friend, an' good luck to ye," he called 
over his shoulder. The whip-lash cracked angrily 
once more, wheelers and leaders settled into their col- 
lars, and the coach tore on amid a rolling cloud of dust. 

"That was perfectly wonderful," said the Lady, 
with a little gasp of satisfaction. "That was quite 

274 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

the nicest thing we've seen since we left Mexico. I 
didn't know that that sort of thing existed any more 
outside of Buffalo Bill's Wild West." 

"It won't exist much longer," said I. "This 
Oregon hinterland is the last American frontier, but 
the railway is coming and in a few more years the only 
place you will be able to see a Concord coach like the 
one we just met will be in a museum or on a moving- 
picture screen. The old fellow was perfectly right when 
he said that our meeting typified the passing of the old 
and the coming of the new." 

"I'm awfully sorry for them," remarked the Lady 
abstractedly. 

"Sorry for whom?" I asked. 

"Why," she answered, "for the people who can 
only see this wonderful West on moving-picture 



We took the back-stairs route to Oregon. When we 
turned the bonnet of the car northward from Lake 
Tahoe, we had the choice of two routes to the Columbia. 
One of these, which we would have taken had we fol- 
lowed the advice of every one with whom we talked, 
would have necessitated our retracing our steps across 
the High Sierras to Sacramento, where we would have 
struck the orthodox and much-travelled highway that 
runs northward through the Sacramento Valley, via 
Marysville and Red Bluff and Redding, enters the Sis- 
kiyous at Shasta and leaves them again at Grant's 
Pass, and keeps on through the fertile and thickly set- 

27S 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

tied valleys of the Rogue, the Umpqua, and the Wil- 
lamette, to Portland and its rose gardens. The other 
route, which is ignored by the road-books and of which 
those human road-books who run the garages seemed to 
be in total ignorance, strikes boldly into the primeval 
wilderness that lies to the north of Tahoe, parallels for 
close on two hundred miles the western boundary of 
Nevada, crosses the Oregon border at Lower Klamath 
Lake, and then, hugging the one hundred and twenty- 
second parallel like a long-lost brother, climbs up and up 
and up over the savage lava beds, through the country 
of the Warm Springs Indians, across the fertile farm 
lands of the Inland Empire, and so down the Canon 
of the Deschutes to where the rocky barrier of The 
Dalles says to the boats upon the Columbia: "You can 
go no further." This is the famous Oregon Trail, which 
lies like a long rope thrown idly on the ground, aban- 
doned by the hand that used it. Though the people 
with whom we talked urged us not to take it, prophe- 
sying long-neglected and impassable roads and total 
lack of accommodation and all manner of disaster, 
we stubbornly persisted in our choice, lured by the 
romantic and historic memories that hover round it; 
for was it not, in its day, one of the most famous of 
all the routes followed by mankind in its migrations; 
was it not the trail taken by those resolute frontiers- 
men who won for us the West ? 

We were warned repeatedly, by people who pro- 
fessed to know whereof they spoke, that, if we per- 
sisted in taking this unconventional and therefore 

276 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

perfectly ridiculous route, we would experience great 
difficulty in crossing the mountains, and, as some of 
our informants cheeringly observed, it was dollars to 
doughnuts that we wouldn't be able to cross them at 
all. But as we had had experiences with these brethren 
of calamity howlers while motoring in Rhodesia and 
in Grande Kabylie and in the Anti-Lebanon, their 
mournful prognostications did not trouble us in the 
least. In fact, they but served to whet our appetites 
for the anticipated adventures. As a matter of fact, 
throughout the entire thousand miles that our speed- 
ometer recorded between Tahoe and The Dalles, not 
once did we cross any mountains worthy of the name, 
for our route, which had been carefully selected for 
its easy gradients long years before our time by men 
who traversed it in prairie-schooners instead of motor- 
cars and whose motive power was oxen instead of 
engines, lay along the gently rolling surface of that 
great mile-high plateau which parallels the eastern 
face of the Cascade Range and comes to a sudden ter- 
mination in the precipitous cliffs which turn the upper 
reaches of the Columbia into a mighty gorge. 

Turning our tonneau upon Truckee and its brawl- 
ing trout-stream, we struck into the forest as the 
compass needle points, with Susanville one hundred 
and fifty miles away, as our day's objective. (Who 
Susan was I haven't the remotest idea, unless she was 
the lady that they named the black-eyed daisies after.) 
For hour after hour the road wound and turned and 
twisted through the grandest forest scenery that can 

277 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

be found between the oceans. To our left, through 
occasional breaks in the giant hedge of fir and spruce 
and jack-pine, we caught fleeting glimpses of Pilot 
Peak, whose purple summit has doubtless served as a 
sign-post for many an Oregon-bound band of pioneers. 
To us, who had seen only the tourist California and the 
highly cultivated valleys of the interior, these Cali- 
fornian highlands proved a constant source of joy and 
self-congratulation. We felt as though we were ex- 
plorers and, so far as motoring for pleasure in that 
region is concerned, we were. But the greatest reve- 
lation was the road. We had expected to need the 
services of an osteopath to re joint our dislocated ver- 
tebrae and, to modify the anticipated jolts, I had had 
the car equipped with shock-absorbers and had taped 
the springs. We could, however, have gone over that 
road with no great discomfort in a springless wagon, 
for, upon a roadbed undisturbed for close on half a 
century by any traffic worthy of the name, had fallen 
so thick and resilient a blanket of pine-needles that 
we felt as though a strip of Brussels carpet had been 
laid for our benefit, as they do in Europe when royalty 
has occasion to set foot upon the ground. The sun- 
beams, slanting through the lofty tree tops, dappled 
the tawny surface of the road with golden splotches 
and fleckings, squirrels chattered at us from the over- 
arching boughs; coveys of grouse, taken unaware by 
the stealth of our approach, rocketed into the air, 
wings whirring like machine guns, only to settle un- 
concernedly as soon as we had passed; an antlered 

278 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

stag bounded suddenly into the road, stood for an 
instant motionless as though cast from iron, with wide- 
open, startled eyes, and disappeared in panic-stricken 
flight; once, swinging silently around a turning, we 
came upon a black bear gorging himself at the free- 
lunch counter that the wild blackberries provide along 
the road; but before we could get our rifles out of their 
cases he had crashed his way into underbrush too 
dense for us to follow. Nor did we have any great 
desire to follow. The smoothness and silence of the 
road were too enchanting. Hour after hour we sped 
noiselessly along without a glimpse of a human being 
or a human habitation. There were no sign-posts to 
point the way and we wanted none. 

But all good things must end in time, and our 
pine-carpeted road debouched quite unexpectedly into 
the loveliest valley that you ever saw. Perhaps it is 
because its sylvan serenity is undisturbed as yet by 
the jeering screech of the locomotive, but you will 
need to use much gasoline and wear out many tires 
before you will happen upon anything more idyllic 
than those cloistered and incredibly fertile acres that 
sweep down from the summit of the Iron Hills to the 
margin of Honey Lake. The trim white farmhouses 
that peep coquettishly, like bashful village maidens, 
from amid the fragrant orchards at the passer-by; the 
fields green-carpeted with sprouting grain; the barns 
whose queer hip-roofs made them look as though they 
were aburst with stored-up produce, as, indeed, they 
are; the sleek cattle, standing knee-deep in a lake as 

279 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

clear as Circe's mirror — all these things spell p-r-o-s- 
p-e-r-i-t-y so plainly that even those who whirl by, as 
we did at forty miles an hour, may read. 

Susanville, which is built on a hill at the end of 
Honey Lake Valley, very much as the Italian hill 
towns command the tributary countryside, is a quiet 
rural community that has been stung by the bee of 
progress and is running around in circles in consequence. 
When we were there a railroad was in course of con- 
struction for the purpose of tapping the wealth of this 
rich but hitherto unexploited region, and the main 
street of the town, which we reached on a Saturday 
evening, was alive with farmers who had come in to 
do their week-end shopping, cow-punchers in gaudy 
neckerchiefs and Angora chaps, fresh from the ranges, 
engineers in high-laced boots and corduroy trousers, 
sun-tanned labourers from all four corners of Europe 
and the places in between. As a result of this week- 
end influx, the only hotel that Susanville possessed 
was filled to the doors. 

"I can't even fix you up with a pool-table, gents," 
said the shirt-sleeved proprietor, mopping the per- 
spiration from his forehead with a violent-hued ban- 
dana; "and what's more, every blame boardin'-house 
in town's just as full up as we are." 

"But we must find some place to sleep," I asserted 
positively. "We've a lady with us, you see, and she 
can't very well sleep in the open — or on a pool-table 
either, can she?" 

"A lady? God bless my soul! Why didn't you 
280 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

say so? Well, now, that's too durned bad. But hold 
on a minute, friends. I wouldn't be s'prised if Bill 
Dooling, the barber, could fix you up. He's got a cot- 
tage down the road a piece and I'll send a boy along 
with you to show you where he lives." 

Bill the barber and his family, which consisted of 
his wife, his mother — ^known as granmaw — nine chil- 
dren who had reached the age of indiscretion, and a 
baby, dwelt in a vine-clad cottage as neat as the pro- 
verbial beeswax and about as roomy as a Hmousine. 

"Sure," said he cordially, when I had explained 
our predicament, "we've got slathers of room. We'll 
fix you up and welcome. You and the lady can have 
Rosamond Clarissa's room, and your friend here can 
have the boys' room across the hall, and your showfer 
can sleep in Ebenezer's bed. Me and the wife'U fix 
ourselves up on the porch, and granmaw she'll go 
acrost the street to a neighbour's, and Abel and Absalom 
and David and Rosamond Clarissa and Ebenezer and 
Elisha and Gwendoline Hortensia and Hiram and 
Isaiah'U sleep in the tent. Sure, we've got all the 
room you want." 

"You must have almost as much trouble in find- 
ing names for your children," the Lady remarked, 
"as the Pullman Company does in naming its sleeping- 
cars." 

"Well, it's this way, ma'am," he explained. "Me 
and maw have a sort of an agreement. She names 
the girls and gets the names out of the magazines. I 
name the boys and get the names out of the Bible. 

281 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

She hoped that the baby'd be a girl so's she could name 
her Patricia Penelope, but seeing as it's a boy it's up 
to me, and I haven't been able to make up my mind 
yet between Jabez, Josiah, and Jeremiah." 

Barring the fact that we were awakened at a some- 
what unseasonable hour by a high-voiced discussion 
between Rosamond Clarissa and Gwendoline Hor- 
tensia as to which should have the privilege of wash- 
ing the baby, we were very comfortable indeed — ^very 
much more so, I expect, than if we had been able to 
obtain quarters at the hotel — and, after a breakfast 
of berries with cream that was not milk incognito, and 
coffee, and hot cakes, and eggs that tasted as though 
they might have originated with a hen instead of a 
cold-storage vault, we rolled away with the hospitable 
barber and his brood waving us Godspeed from the 
doorstep. 

It is in the neighbourhood of two hundred and 
fifty miles from Susanville to the Oregon line, the 
earlier portion of the journey taking us through a 
forest that had evidently never known the woodsman's 
axe. North of Dry Lake Ranch, which is the only 
place in between where a motorist can count on finding 
a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat, a grazing country of 
remarkable fertility begins, much of it having been 
taken up by Czechs from Bohemia: a stolid, sturdy, 
industrious folk who work themselves and their pa- 
tient families and the ground unremittingly and whose 
prosperity, therefore, passes that of their more shift- 
less neighbours at a gallop. This fringe of farming 

282 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

communities, although in CaHfornia, really mark the 
beginning of that great, rich agricultural region com- 
prising the back country of Oregon which, because of 
its prosperity, its extent, and its wealth of resources, is 
known as the Inland Empire. 

A few miles beyond these Bohemian settlements 
we caught our first glimpse of Lower Klamath Lake, 
whose low and marshy shores, which lie squarely 
athwart the boundary between California and Oregon, 
forming a spring and autumn rendezvous for untold 
thousands of wild fowl, the government having set it 
aside as a sort of natural aviarium. 

"Look!" suddenly exclaimed the Lady, pointing. 
*'The shores of the lake are covered with snow!" 

But what looked for all the world like an expanse 
of snow suddenly transformed itself, as we drew near, 
into a cloud of huge, ungainly birds with perfectly 
enormous bills, creating a racket like a thousand motor- 
cars with the beating of their wings. 

"Pelicans, by Jove!" exclaimed my friend, and 
that is what they were — thousands, yes, tens of thou- 
sands of them. The pelican, as we learned later, is 
the symbol, as it were, of all this Klamath country, 
the really beautiful hotel at Klamath Falls being 
named The White Pehcan, "perhaps," as the Lady 
observed, "because of the size of its bill." However 
this may be, it is a very excellent hotel, indeed, and if 
you ever chance to find yourself in that part of the 
country I would advise you to spend a night there, if 
for no other reason than to enjoy the novel experience 

283 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

of staying in a hostelry which would do credit to Fifth 
Avenue and looking out of your window on a frontier 
town. This, mind you, is casting no aspersions on 
Klamath Falls, which is a very prosperous and wide- 
awake little place indeed, although ten years ago you 
would have had some difficulty in finding it on the map, 
its mushroom growth being due to the development of 
the immense lumber territory of which, since the com- 
pletion of the railway, it has become the centre. As a 
matter of fact, the hotel was not built so much for the 
convenience of the traveller as it was for the comfort 
of the handful of Eastern capitalists whose great lum- 
ber interests necessitate their spending a considerable 
portion of the year in Klamath Falls and who demanded 
the same luxuries and conveniences in this backwoods 
town that they would have on Broadway. That 
explains why it is that in this remote settlement in 
the wilderness you can get a room furnished in cre- 
tonne and Circassian walnut, with a white porcelain 
bathroom opening from it, and can sit down to dinner 
at a red-shaded table in a gold-and-ivory dining-room. 
I know a man who keeps a private orchestra of thirty 
pieces, year in and year out, for his own amusement, 
but these Oregon lumber kings are the only men I 
have ever heard of who have built a great city hotel 
purely for their personal convenience. 

The late E. H. Harriman, knowing the continent 
and having the continent to choose from, built a shoot- 
ing lodge on the shores of Upper Klamath Lake, to 
which he was wont to retreat, after the periodical 

284 




Crater Lake : "It looks like a gigantic washtub filled with blueing 









,*-"> .. . "" •'. ^■,'^;i V- ,"'^'. '-■■■*> '•'"•.''3^-^' ^w-~*'*^^ 



A flock of young pelicans on the shores of Lower Klamath Lake. 
IN THE OREGON' HINTERLAND. 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

strikes and railroad mergers and congressional investi- 
gations which punctuated his career, for rest and recre- 
ation. After the death of the great railway builder 
the lodge was purchased by the same group of men 
who built The White PeHcan Hotel and has been con- 
verted into a sort of sporting resort de luxe. They call 
it Pelican Bay Lodge, and I know of nothing quite 
like it anywhere. It consists of perhaps a dozen log 
cabins, externally as rough as any frontiersman's 
dwelling, but steam-heated, luxuriously furnished, and 
liberally bathtubised. 

Pelican Bay Lodge is the most convenient start- 
ing-point for that mountain mystery known as Crater 
Lake, which lies forty miles to the north of it and six 
thousand feet above it, in the heart of the Cascade 
Range. It took us five hours of steady running to 
cover those forty miles, and we didn't stop to pick 
wild flowers either. The road is a very beautiful one, 
winding steadily upward through one of the finest 
pine forests on the continent. The last mile is more 
like mountaineering than motoring, however, for the 
road, in order to attain the rim of the lake, suddenly 
shoots upward at a perfectly appalling angle — I think 
they told me that at one place it had a grade of thirty- 
eight per cent — and naore than once it seemed to us 
who were sitting in the tonneau that the car would 
tip over backward, like a horse that rears until it over- 
balances itself. Crater Lake is one of those places 
where the most calloused globe-trotter, from whom 
neither the Pyramids nor the Taj Mahal would wring 

28s 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

an exclamation of approval, gives, perforce, a gasp of 
real astonishment and admiration. Part of this is 
due, no doubt, to the startling suddenness with which 
you come upon it and to its dramatic situation; the 
rest to its surpassing beauty and its extraordinary 
colour. The lake, which occupies the crater of an ex- 
tinct volcano the size and height of Mount Shasta, is 
almost circular, half a mile deep, five miles in circum- 
ference, and nearly a mile and a half above sea-level, 
the rocky walls which surround it being in places two 
thousand feet high and as sheer and smooth as the 
side of an upright piano. But its outstanding feature 
is its colour, for it is the bluest blue you ever saw or 
dreamed of: as blue as lapis lazuli, as a forget-me- 
not, as an Italian sky, as a baby's eyes (provided, of 
course, that it is a blue-eyed baby), or as a Monday 
morning. It looks, indeed, like a gigantic wash-tub, 
filled with bluing, in which some weary colossus has 
been condemned to wash the clothing of the world. 

Nothing that we had seen since leaving Mexico so 
profoundly stirred my imagination as that portion of 
our road which stretched northward from Crater Lake, 
through Crescent and Shaniko, to The Dalles. Every 
few miles we passed groups of dilapidated and decay- 
ing buildings, with sunken roofs and boarded windows, 
which must once have been busy road-houses and 
stage stations, for near them were the remains of great 
barns and tumble-down corrals, now long since dis- 
used — melancholy reminders of those days, half a 
century agone, when down this lonely road that we 

286 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

were following plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the 
heads of women and children at every rent and loop- 
hole of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder, 
marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of 
these pioneers were rich in anything save children, 
affluent except in expectations; yet weather, roads, 
fare, mishaps — nothing daunted them, for they were 
"going West." 

Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from 
Shaniko to The Dalles, over a road most of which is 
back-breakingly rough and all of which is so intolerably 
dusty that we felt as though we were covered with 
sandpaper instead of skin. But the scenery of the 
last half dozen miles caused us to forgive, if not to 
forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those 
preceding, for in them we dropped down through the 
wild and winding gorge which the Deschutes follows 
on its way to join hands with its big sister, the Colum- 
bia. The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher 
our expectations grew, and every time we topped a 
rise or swung around a granite shoulder we searched 
for it eagerly, just as our migrating predecessors must 
have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that 
wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until, 
our road emerging from the canon's mouth upon the 
precipice's brink, we suddenly found ourselves looking 
down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering 
and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away, 
away, away: eastward to its birthplace in the country 
of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and its mother, 

287 



THE END OF THE TRAH. 

the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like 
the little wooden villages you see in the windows of 
toy stores, the white houses of The Dalles were clus- 
tered upon the river's banks. 

The highroad, which had been palpably aihng for 
some time, took a sudden turn for the worse a few 
miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it found the 
great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its 
path, the temptation became too great to resist and it 
ended its misery in the river, leaving us, its faithful 
friends, who had borne it company all the way from 
Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell 
that we were compelled to put the car and ourselves 
aboard a boat and trust to steam, instead of gasoline, 
to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey. 
It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do, 
of course — but what would you ? There were no more 
roads. We were in the deplorable position of the man 
who told his wife that he came home because all the 
other places were closed. And think how keenly the 
veteran car — 

"Me that 'ave been what I've been, 
Me that 'ave gone where I've gone, 
Me that 'ave seen what I've seen" 

— must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to 
a crew of stevedores and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing 
second mate, who unceremoniously sandwiched it 
between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on 

288 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

the lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel 
river boat. 

But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased 
their creaking complaints about the burden we had 
imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves 
on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a 
hot and dusty highroad for a cool and silent water- 
way. To me there is something irresistibly fascinating 
and seductive about a river. I always find myself 
wondering where it comes from, and what strange 
things it has seen along its course, and where it is going 
to, and I invariably have a hankering to take ship and 
keep it company. And the greater the stream, the 
greater its fascination, because, of course, it has trav- 
elled so much farther. Now the Columbia, as that 
friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn, would have put it, 
is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were 
carefully straightened out it would reach half-way 
across the continent, or as far as from New York to 
Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for one who 
visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, 
with the purpose of writing about it, to have these 
facts suddenly thrown, as it were, in his face, particu- 
larly if, like myself, he has been brought up in that 
part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as 
the only real river in America — doubtless because it 
washes the shores of Manhattan — and where all other 
waterways are looked upon as being not much better 
than creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and 
when. On top of all this, I was told that the Columbia 

289 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

and its tributaries drain a region equal in area to all the 
States along our Atlantic seaboard put together, I had 
a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and 
take a train back home. 

Though of British birth, for it has its source above 
the Canadian line in the country of the Kootenai, the 
Columbia emends this unfortunate circumstance by 
becoming naturalised when it is still a slender stripling, 
dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon and 
Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for up- 
ward of four hundred miles. It is not only the father 
of Northwestern waters, but it is the big brother of all 
those streams, from the Straits of Behring to the Straits 
of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean "grandpa." 
By white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, 
by produce-laden barge, by bark canoe, by the goat- 
skin raft called kelek, I have loitered my leisurely 
way down many famous rivers — the St. Lawrence, 
the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Eraser, the Skeena, 
the Rio Balsas, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the 
Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi, the Nile — and I 
assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in 
the continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia 
is the superior of them all. If you think that I am car- 
ried away by enthusiasm you had better go and see 
it for yourself. 

It was Carlyle — ^was it not? — who remarked that 
all great works produce an unpleasant impression on 
first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia. We 
saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights 

290 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

above Celilo — the great, silent, mysterious river wind- 
ing away into the unknown between banks of lava as 
sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna, and with 
a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. 
There were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no 
vegetation of any kind, none of the things that one 
usually associates with a river. But when the steamer 
bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs 
that rise sheer from the surface of the river below The 
Dalles — ah, well, that is quite another matter. 

Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give 
The Dalles its name, by compressing the half-mile- 
wide river into a channel barely sixscore feet across, 
have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon 
the Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiphed and 
population increased along the upper reaches of the 
great river and its tributaries in Washington and 
Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the 
navigation of so splendid a waterway became intoler- 
able, unthinkable, absurd. At last the frock-coated 
gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and 
the passage of a bill for the construction of a canal 
around The Dalles, at Celilo, was the result. Came 
then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who, jeering at the 
obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, 
proceeded to slash a canal through eight miles of shift- 
ing sands and basalt rock, so that hereafter the fruit 
growers and farmers and ranchers as far inland as 
Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to 
the sea in ships. 

291 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"The trouble with the Columbia," complained 
the Lady, "is that it's all scenery and no romance. 
It's too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It doesn't 
arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told 
that this river irrigates goodness knows how many 
thousand square miles of land, or that the top of that 
mountain over there is so many thousand feet above 
the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels 
of apples were grown last year in the valley we just 
passed and that they brought so many dollars a bar- 
rel. Facts like those are all well enough in an almanac, 
because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they 
don't interest me and I don't believe that they interest 
many other visitors, either. If a river hasn't any ro- 
mance connected with it, it isn't much better than a 
canal. Don't you remember that rock in the Bos- 
phorus, near Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out 
to see Hero, and how when we passed it the passengers 
would all rush over to that side of the deck, and how 
the steamer would list until her rail was almost under 
water, and how the Turkish ofi&cers would get fright- 
ened half to death and shove the people back? You 
don't see the passengers on this boat threatening to 
capsize it because of their anxiety to see something 
romantic, do you? I should say not. Do you remem- 
ber Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates, where all 
Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, 
long before we reached there, we could smell the 
Caravans of the Dead which were carrying the bodies 

there from across the desert? And those crumbling, 

292 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer 
legends and traditions and superstitions? That's 
what I mean by romance, and you know as well as I 
do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards 
and salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?" 

"Pardon me, madam," said a gentleman who had 
been seated so close to us that he could not help over- 
hearing what she said and who had been unable to 
conceal his disagreement with the views she had ex- 
pressed, "but do you see that island over there near 
the Washington shore? The long, low one with the 
little white monument sticking up at the end of it. 
That is Memaloose — the Island of the Dead. It is 
the Indian Valhalla. Talk about the Persians whose 
bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at Ker- 
bela ! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of 
that island are buried untold thousands of Chinooks, 
whose bodies were brought on the backs of men hun- 
dreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes 
down long and lonely rivers that they might find their 
last resting-places in its sacred soil? And the monu- 
ment that you see marks the grave of a frontiersman 
who was as romantic a character as you will find in 
the pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor 
Trevet; he knew and liked the Indians; and he asked 
to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might lie 
among those of 'honest men.' Is it legend and tradi- 
tion that you say the river lacks? A few miles ahead 
of us, at the Cascades, the river was once spanned, ac- 
cording to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural 

293 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the 
Gods. The great river flowed under it, and on it lived 
a witch woman named Loowit, who had charge of the 
only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the 
lot of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked 
meats and vegetables, she begged permission of the 
gods to give them fire. Her request was granted and 
the condition of the Indians was thus enormously 
improved. So gratified were the gods by Loowit's 
consideration for the welfare of the Indians that they 
promised to grant any request that she might make. 
Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. 
Whereupon she was transformed into a maiden whose 
loveliness would have caused Lina Cavalieri to go out 
of the professional beauty business. The news of her 
beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer 
grass, there came numberless youths who pleaded for 
her hand, or, rather, for the face and figure that went 
with it. Among them were two young chieftains: 
Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. 
As she was unable to decide between them, they and 
their tribesmen decided to settle the rivalry with the 
tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste 
of lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two 
gentlemen friends to death and sent the great bridge 
on which she had dwelt crashing down into the river. 
But as they had all three been good to look upon in 
life, so the gods, who were evidently aesthetic, made 
them good to look upon even in death by turning them 
into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which 

294 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they trans- 
formed into the peak we know as Mount Adams; while 
Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful form taken by the 
fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the 
Gods destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the 
debris which fell into it. In a few minutes we will be 
at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of the bridge 
for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts 
as to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in 
his white blanket rising above the forests to the right, 
and Wiyeast is over there to your left, and ahead of 
us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as 
Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for 
doubt. 

"You assert that the Columbia is lacking in ro- 
mance because, forsooth, no Leander has swum across 
it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young lady, 
I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a- 
yard-wide romance in it than a dozen such Hellespon- 
tine fables. Did you never hear of Whitman the mis- 
sionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to 
win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire ? 

"In the early forties Whitman established amission 
station near the present site of Walla Walla. Hearing 
rumours that our government was on the point of ac- 
commodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to 
England in return for some paltry fishing rights off 
the banks of Newfoundland — the government officials 
of those days evidently preferred codfish to salmon — ■ 
he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter, 

295 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

through bhnding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, 
subsisting on his pack-mules and his dogs when his 
food ran out, facing death by torture at the hands of 
hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White 
House in his dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet 
and fingers terribly frozen, he so impressed President 
Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his vivid 
description of the richness and fertility of the region 
which they were on the point of ceding to England 
that he saved the entire Pacific Northwest to the 
Union. If that isn't sufficient romance for you, then 
I'm afraid you're hard to please." 

"I surrender," said the Lady. "Your old Colum- 
bia has plenty of romance, after all. The trouble is 
that tourists don't know these interesting things that 
you've just been teUing us and they do know all about 
the Danube and the Rhine." 

"That's easily remedied," said I. "I'll tell them 
about it myself." 

And that, my friends, is precisely what I have 
just been trying to do. 

"Next stop Hood River!" bawled the purser. 

"That's where the apples come from," remarked 
our deck acquaintance, who had turned himself into a 
guide-book for our benefit. "In some of the orchards 
up the valley you'll find apples with paper letters 
pasted on them: 'C de P' for the Cafe de Paris, you 
know, and 'W-A' for the Waldorf-Astoria, and 'G R 
& I' for Georgius Rex et Imperator — which is not the 

296 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on 
quite carefully when the apples are still green upon 
the tree, and when they ripen the paper is torn off, 
leaving the yellow initials on the bright red fruit. 
Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets 
and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart 
restaurants in Europe. I don't mean to imply that 
all of the Hood River apples are thus initialled to order, 
but some of them are. The average value of the land 
in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three 
hundred and forty dollars an acre, and if a man wanted 
to purchase an orchard in bearing he would have to 
pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some 
people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. 
If it was, I don't blame Eve for stealing the apple. 
I'd steal a Hood River apple myself if I got the chance." 
Had the second mate been a little more obliging, 
and had there not been so formidable a barricade of 
crates and milk cans about the car, I would have had 
it run ashore then and there and would have taken a 
whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover 
the lower slopes of Mount Hood and have kept on up 
the zigzag mountain road as far as the cosy little 
hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public- 
spirited Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Per- 
haps it was just as well we didn't, however, for I learned 
afterward that the famous valley is only about twenty 
miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency 
brake before we started, we would have run through it 
before we could have stopped and would not have seen 

297 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture 
of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before 
us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage 
of the steamer's upper deck, we looked up the vista 
formed by this fragrant, verdant valley toward the 
great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so 
very beautiful that those Americans who know and 
love the world's white rooftrees can find scant justi- 
fication for turning their faces toward the Alps when 
here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own coun- 
try, are mountains which would make the ghost of the 
great Whymper moan for an alpenstock and hob- 
nailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition from 
orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, 
and from these forests to the stately, isolated snow 
peaks, is very different from Switzerland, of course. 
Indeed, to compare these mountains of the Pacific 
Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, 
seems to me to be a grave injustice to them both. The 
Alps form a wild and angry sea of icy mountains, and 
we have nothing in America to which they can be fit- 
tingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, 
form a great system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges 
surmounted by the towering isolated peaks of snowy 
volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. 
I am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large 
number of Americans who spend their summers in the 
ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks — more often than 
not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular 
railways or through telescopes on hotel piazzas — ^look 

298 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

with scorn and contumely upon these mountains of 
the far Nor'west, which they regard as home-made and 
unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering 
about. Perhaps they are not aware, however, that no 
less an authority on mountaineering than James Bryce 
(I don't recall the title that he has taken now that he 
has been made a peer, and no one would recognise him 
if I used it) said not long ago, in speaking of these sen- 
tinels that guard the Columbia: 

"We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland 
or Tyrol, in Norway or the Pyrenees. The combina- 
tion of ice scenery with woodland scenery of the 
grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, 
unless it be in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, 
nowhere else on the American continent." 

Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners 
are more appreciative of the beauties and grandeurs 
of our country than we are ourselves. 

At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of 
half a hundred feet and we had, perforce, to bide our 
time in the locks, by means of which the rapids have 
been circumvented, until the waters found their level. 
It is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery 
for which the Columbia is famous begins in all its 
sublimity and grandeur. The Great Artist has painted 
pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as 
the Grand Canon, for example, the Yellowstone, and 
the Sahara, but none which combines the qualities of 
strength and restfulness as this mighty river, flowing 

299 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From 
the shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace 
above terrace, until they become merged in the forest- 
covered ranges, and above the ranges rise the august 
snow peaks, sohtary, silent, like a Une of sentries strung 
along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early 
morning and again at sunset, these snow mountains 
present that singular appearance famihar to the trav- 
eller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when the 
snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea 
of mist which completely shrouds the hills and forests 
at its base. Immediately below the Cascades com- 
mences the series of waterfalls for which the lower 
reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs 
which, for nearly twoscore miles border the Oregon 
shore with a sheer wall of rock, being scored at fre- 
quent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be 
ribbons of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, 
however, you see that what looked Uke ribbons are 
really mountain streams which are so impatient to 
join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking 
the more sedate but circuitous route, they fling them- 
selves tempestuously over the brink of the sheer cliff 
into the arms of the parent stream. First come the 
Horsetail Falls, whose falHng waters, blo\sai by the 
wind into silvery strands, are suggestive of the flowing 
tail of a white Arab; then, in quick succession, the 
Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which 
penetrates the cHffs for a mile or more; the nine- 
hundred-feet-high Multnomah, the highest falls in all 
the northwest country if not, indeed, on the entire 

300 




^■5 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful 
as its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just 
below the great monolith rising from the river known 
as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On the oppo- 
site shore the mighty promontory known as Cape 
Horn rises five hundred feet above the surface of the 
river, and, a few miles farther up-stream. Castle Rock, 
whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance to 
some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice 
that height. By the time the steamer reaches the 
mighty natural gateway known as the Pillars of Her- 
cules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur 
and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral 
scenes again, just as one after a season of Wagnerian 
opera welcomes the simple airs and the old-fashioned 
songs. 

As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, 
nor munch dripping ice-cream cones, and as I have an 
unconquerable aversion to other people doing those 
unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left the 
others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoy- 
ances, among the excursionists upon the upper deck 
and made my way below. After clambering over great 
piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia 
River produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded 
spot in the vessel's bows, whence I could watch, un- 
disturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or idle chatter, 
the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern- 
wheel, twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from 
shore to shore to pick up the passengers and freight 
that patiently awaited their coming; rusty freighters 

301 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast 
towns and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick- 
and-span pleasure craft, with shining brass work 
and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked their way- 
through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks 
her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, 
their sails as weather-beaten as the faces of the men 
that raise them, danced by us, eager for home and 
supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed 
by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy 
sawmills, whose sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacri- 
fice and scream for more. 

Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic 
feature of the landscape along the lower Columbia 
are the fish-wheels — ingenious contrivances, twenty 
to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, 
which look like pocket editions of the passenger-car- 
rying Ferris wheel at the Chicago Exposition. The 
wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks 
close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, 
are revolved by the current, which keeps the wire- 
meshed scoops with which each pair of spokes are fitted 
for ever lifting from the water. The great schools of 
salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lat- 
tice dam which reaches out into the river like the arm 
of a false friend, and, before the unsuspecting fish 
know what has happened to them, they are hoisted 
into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an 
inclined trough, down which they slide into a fenced-in 
pool, where the fishermen can get them at their leisure. 
They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel 

302 



"WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON" 

which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton 
of fish traiHng behind it like the tail to a kite, floating 
down-stream to the nearest cannery, where a man in a 
launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore. 
Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rum- 
ford Falls, or wherever else you may happen to be din- 
ing, you will see the item "Columbia River Salmon" 
on the hotel menu. 

As I hung over the steamer's bow, with the in- 
comparable landscape slipping past me as though on 
Burton Holmes's picture screen, and no sound save 
the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of 
the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously 
yielded to the Columbia's mystic spell. I closed my 
eyes and in a moment the surface of the river seemed 
peopled with the ghosts of the history makers. Nez 
Perces, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along, 
in the shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken 
war canoes. Two lean and sun-bronzed white men, 
clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring fron- 
tiersman, floated past me down the mighty stream 
which they had trekked across a continent to find. 
Half-breed trappers, chanting at the paddles, descended 
with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged mer- 
chantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a 
rocky headland, and as she passed I noted the words 
Columbia, of Boston, in raised gilt letters on her stern, 
and I remembered that it was from this same square- 
rigged vessel that the river took its name. A warship, 
flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles 
of guns peering from its rows of ports, cautiously 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for 
river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission 
stations once again crowned the encircHng hills. For- 
gotten battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow 
dust cloud rose above the river bank and out of it 
emerged a plodding wagon- train. The smoke of pioneer 
camp-fires spiralled skyward from those rich vaUeys 
where in reality the cattle browse and the orchards 
droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky prom- 
ontory a ghostly war party peered down upon me — a 
paleface — taking a summer's holiday along that mighty 
stream upon whose bosom of old went forth the be- 
painted fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped 
behind night's velvet curtain. The mountains changed 
from jade to coral, from coral to sapphire, from sap- 
phire to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed lumi- 
nously, Hke sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of 
the sky. The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The 
steamer swung silently around a bend in the river 
and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled 
with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked 
like fireflies. 

"Portland!" shouted a raucous voice, far off 
somewhere, on the upper deck. "Portland! All 
ashore ! " 

I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady. 

"Where on earth have you been?" she asked. 
"We have been hunting for you everjrwhere." 

"I've been on a long journey," said I. 



304 



XI 
A FRONTIER ARCADY 



"Oh, woods of the West, I am sighing to-day 
For the sea songs your voices repeat, 
For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away 
From the stifling air of the street. 

"And I long, ah, I long to be with you again, 
And to dream in that region of rest, 
Forever apart from this warring of men — 
Oh, wonderful woods of the West." 



XI 

A FRONTIER ARCADY 

" Arcady — the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses, 
where rustic simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of un- 
tutored hearts and where ambition and its crimes were unknown" 

SOME pamphlet writer with a gift for turning 
phrases has called Oregon "The Land That Lures." 
And, so far as home and fortune seekers are concerned, 
it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our 
people have always associated with the great North- 
west; whether it is the glamour of its booming rivers 
and its silent, axe-ripe forests or the appeal of its soft 
and balmy climate; or whether it is the extraordinary 
opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest 
fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not 
know, but the undeniable fact remains that no region 
between the Portlands exercises so irresistible a fas- 
cination for the man who knows the trick of coaxing a 
fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable, 
unfenced, forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow- 
and-orchard-and-home land that stretches from the 
Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that 
California holds more attractions for the man who has 
already made his fortune, but certainly Oregon is the 
place to make the fortune in. No Western State is 
essentially less "Western" in the accepted sense of the 

307 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that 
it has been longer settled by Americans than any other 
portion of the Pacific Coast. Portland was a thriving 
city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis were 
little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Set- 
tlers from the Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle 
West find themselves, upon reaching Oregon, in the 
midst of "home folks" and all the friendly, kindly, 
homely things that the term implies: ice-cream socia- 
bles and grange meetings and church picnics and 
literary societies and debating clubs and county fairs. 
The name of the State capital is inseparably associated 
with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is 
named after the Massachusetts town which gave its 
name to rum, and I can show you a score of towns 
whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed, 
red-brick houses might almost — but not quite — de- 
ceive you into thinking that you are in Cooperstown, 
N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford, Me. 
Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of 
these Oregonian towns, despite the staidness and so- 
briety of their appearance, are animated by an en- 
thusiasm, an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith 
in their future, that is essentially a characteristic of 
the West. 

The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the 
south is by way of Ashland, Medford, and Grant's 
Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and Eugene 
and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have 
related in the preceding chapter, we deliberately chose 

308 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

the back-stairs route, crossing the Cahfornia-Oregon 
Hne at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along 
the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater 
Lake and the valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles, 
and thence down the Columbia to Portland. We 
prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraor- 
dinarily comprehensive idea of the State and its re- 
sources, not to mention having traversed a region 
which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he 
travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came 
to talk with some people from western Oregon we found 
that we didn't know nearly as much about the State 
as we thought we did. 

"How did you find the roads in the Willamette 
Valley?" inquired a friend with whom we were dining 
one night in Portland. 

"We haven't seen the Willamette Valley," I ex- 
plained. "You see, we came round the other way." 

"I suppose you've been down to Salem, though — 
nice city, Salem." 

"No," I was forced to admit, "we haven't been to 
Salem." 

"What did you think of the Marble Halls? 
Many people claim they're finer than the Mammoth 
Cave." 

"The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are 
they? I never heard of them." 

"I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant's 
Pass country. I hear that the trout are running big 
down there this season." 

309 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"No, we didn't come through Grant's Pass." 

"Well, you surely don't mean to tell me that you 
didn't visit the Rogue River Valley — the apple-cellar 
of the world?" 

"Sorry to say we didn't." 

"Nor the valley of the Umpqua?" 

"No." 

"Well," after a long and painful pause, "what in 
the name of Heaven have you seen?" 

"I think," said I, turning to the others, "that the 
thing for us to do is to turn the car south again and see 
Oregon. Else we shall never be able to hold up our 
heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand 
miles or so of the State that we've just come through 
apparently don't count." 

Though I made the remark facetiously, it con- 
tained a good-sized germ of truth. Just now the back 
country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our Teutonic 
friends would call it, doesn't count for very much. It 
is going to count tremendously, mind you, in the not 
far distant future, when the railroads now under con- 
struction have opened it up to civilisation and com- 
merce and when it is settled by the European hordes 
that will pour into it through the gateway of Panama. 
As things stand at present, however, the wealth and 
prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that com- 
paratively narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies 
between the sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed 
by the Cascades, and whose farms and orchards are 
watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue. 

310 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

It was one of those autumn days so characteristic 
of the Pacific Northwest, which seem to be a combina- 
tion of an Itahan June and a Devonshire September, 
when we sHpped out of Portland's rush and bustle and 
turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and 
the open country. For a dozen miles or more our 
road, built high on the hill slope above the broad 
reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as en- 
trancing a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen. 
For six solid miles south of Portland the banks of the 
Willamette are bordered by country houses of shingle, 
stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful 
rose gardens this side of Persia (Portland, you know, 
is called "The City of Roses") and with shaven lawns 
sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the 
river's edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery 
which Hnes the highway we caught fleeting glimpses, 
as we whirled past, of vine-covered garages housing 
shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were 
moored lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking 
speed, for those who are fortunate enough — and wealthy 
enough — to own homes upon the Willamette are able 
to run in to their offices in the city either by road or 
river. Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of 
Mount Saint Helens rose above the miles of intervening 
forest, and, farther to the southward, the hoary head 
of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential 
Portland which lies along the banks of the Willamette 
there is a suggestion of the Thames near Hampton 
Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a subtle 

311 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

reminder of those residences which have been built by 
the rich of Budapest along the Danube, but most of 
all it recalls Stockholm. This is due, I suppose, to the 
proximity of the forests which surround the city, to 
the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind 
them, and to the ever-present scent of balsam in the 
air. 

It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to 
Salem, which is the capital of the State, and when the 
roads are dry you can leave one city after an early 
dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains 
have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however, 
it is a different matter altogether, for the roads, which 
leave a great deal to be desired, are for the most part 
of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with chains 
on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a 
Scotchman going home after celebrating the birthday 
of Robert Burns. Salem is as pleasing to the eye as a 
certified cheque. It is asphalted and electric-lighted 
and landscaped to the very hmit. Though the resi- 
dential architecture of the city shows unmistakable 
traces of the influence of both Queen Anne and Mary 
Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than counter- 
balanced by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad, 
hospitable piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by: 
" Come right up, friend, and sit down and make your- 
self to home." That's the most striking characteristic 
of the place — ^hospitality. 

The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the 
same day that we arrived in Salem, though I do not 

312 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

wish to be understood as intimating that the two events 
bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is gener- 
ally a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condi- 
tion of a region. The first thing that strikes the visitor 
upon entering the gates of a New England fair is the 
extraordinary number of ramshackle, mud-stained, 
"democrat" wagons lined up along the fence, the horses 
munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first 
thing that struck me as we entered the grounds of the 
Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary number of 
shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt 
Cup Race, I don't recall ever having seen so many 
motor-cars on one stretch of road as we encountered 
on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a noise 
Hke the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though 
there was, of course, a preponderance of little cars, 
there were also any number of big six-cylinder seven- 
passenger machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if 
not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the 
farm in rattletrap wagons, they came tearing down 
the pike in shiny, spick-and-span automobiles; pa at the 
steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and whiskers 
streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside 
him, and grandma and the youngsters filling up the 
tonneau. It did my heart good to see them. There is 
an intangible something about a motor-car that seems 
to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community 
a new lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine 
published a picture of a group of cars at some rural 
gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely labelled it: 

313 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"Where the old cars go to." It elicited a wave of 
indignant letters from automobile dealers and auto- 
mobile owners in that section of the country that made 
the editor feel as though he had stepped on a charged 
wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several 
cancelled subscriptions, that, wherever else the second- 
hand cars go, they certainly do not go to the North- 
west, whose people might well take as their motto: 
"The best is none too good for us." 

Your Oregonian farmer, unlike his fellows in the 
older, colder States, is neither hidebound nor conserva- 
tive. He has no kinship with the bewhiskered, be- 
booted, by-gum and by-gosh hayseed made familiar 
by the comic papers and the bucolic dramas. Instead 
of shying from a new-fangled device as a horse does 
from a steam roller, he promptly gives it a trial and, 
if it makes good, he adopts it. He milks his cows and 
makes his butter by electricity, orders his groceries 
from the nearest town and asks for the baseball score 
by telephone, goes to church and to market in his 
motor-car, and passes his evenings with the aid of a 
circulating library, a pianola, and a phonograph. It 
did not take me long to find out that Oregon is as pro- 
gressive agriculturally as it is politically. If the farmer 
does not succeed in Oregon it is because he has been 
hypnotised by those siren sisters. Obstinacy and Lazi- 
ness; for if he is ignorant, the State stands ready to 
educate him; if he is perplexed, it stands ready to 
advise him; and if he gets into trouble, it stands ready 
to assist him. In other words, it wants him to make 

314 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

good, and it isn't the fault of the State if he does not. 
For this purpose it maintains, in addition to the State 
Agricultural College at Corvallis, which is one of the 
most completely equipped institutions of its kind in 
the world, six experimental farms which are geographi- 
cally distributed so as to meet practically every con- 
dition of agriculture found in Oregon. Two extensive 
demonstration farms are maintained, moreover, by 
business interests, and there is an enormous amount 
of agricultural co-operative work among the farmers 
themselves, so that if a man is in doubt as to whether 
he had better go in for Jerseys or Holsteins, for White 
Wyandottes or Plymouth Rocks, for Spitzenbergs or 
Newtown Pippins, all he has to do to obtain expert 
advice is to ask for it. 

It is an undeniable fact that at most fairs in the 
East, and at a great many in the West, for that matter, 
the wheel-of-fortune, the ring-and-cane, and the three- 
balls-for-a-dime-and-your-money-back-if-you-hit-the- 
coon concessionaires, the fat woman, the living skeleton, 
the bearded lady, and the wild man from Borneo, to 
say nothing of the raucous-voiced venders of ice-cold- 
lemonade-made-in-the-shade and red-hot-coney-islands- 
only-a-nickel-half-a-dime, serve to distract both the 
attention and the shekels of the rural visitors from the 
legitimate exhibits. It seemed to me that the farmers 
and fruit growers who came pouring into the Salem 
fair were there for purposes of education rather than 
recreation. They seemed to take the fair seriously and 
with the idea of obtaining all the information and sug- 

315 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

gestions that they could from it. Eager, attentive 
groups surrounded the lecturers from the State Agri- 
cultural College and constantly interrupted them with 
intelligent, penetrating queries as to soils, grafting, 
fertilisers, insect sprays, and the like, while out in the 
long cattle sheds the men who are growing rich from 
milk and butter talked of Aaggie Arethusa Korndyke 
Koningen Colantha Clothilde Netherland Pietertje's 
Queen of the Dairy IV and of Alban Albino Segis Pon- 
tiac Johann Hengerveld's Monarch of the Meadows 
(the bearer of this last resonant title proving, upon 
investigation, to be a wabbly-kneed three-weeks-old 
calf) as casually as a New Yorker would refer to Connie 
Mack or Caruso or John Drew, 

We went to the fair, as I have already intimated, 
for the primary purpose of getting a line on rural con- 
ditions as they exist in Oregon; but that did not pre- 
vent us from doing things which visitors to county 
fairs have done ever since county fairs began. We 
tossed rings — three-for-a-dime-step-right-this-way-and 
try-your-luck-ladies-and-gents — over a bed of cane 
heads so temptingly thick that it seemed it would be only 
by a miracle that you could miss one, and after spend- 
ing a dollar in rings the Lady won a bamboo walking- 
stick which she could have bought for ten cents almost 
anywhere and which she didn't have the remotest use 
for, anyway. We tried our luck at breaking clay pipes 
in the shooting-gallery, and, in spite of the fact that 
the sights on my rifle had been deliberately hammered 
a quarter of an inch out of line, I succeeded in winning 

316 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

three dubious-looking cigars, to the proprietor's very- 
great astonishment. Had I smoked them I should not 
have survived to write this story. Then we leaned over 
the pig-pens and poked the pink, fat hogs with the 
yard-sticks which some enterprising advertiser had 
forced upon us; in the art department we gravely 
admired the cross-stitched mottoes bearing such vir- 
tuous sentiments as, "Virtue Is Its Own Reward," and 
"There's No Place Like Home," and the water-colour 
studies of impossible fruit perpetrated "by Jane Maria 
Simpkins, aged eleven years." Then we went over to 
the race-track and hung over the rail and became as 
excited over the result of the 2.40 free-for-all as we used 
to be in the old days at Morris Park before the anti- 
racing bill became a law. In fact, I surreptitiously 
wagered a dollar with an itinerant book-maker on a 
sixteen-to-one shot, on the ground that, as the horse 
had the same name as the Lady, it would surely prove 
a winner — and lost. Not until dark settled down and 
the lights of the homeward-bound cars had turned the 
highway into an excellent imitation of the Chicago 
freight yards did we climb into the tonneau again, 
sticky and dusty and tired, and tell the driver to "hit 
it up for the nearest hotel." . 

From Salem to Eugene, down the pretty and well- 
wooded valley of the Willamette, is seventy odd miles 
as the motor goes, and the scenery throughout every 
mile of the distance looks exactly like those pictures 
you see on bill-boards advertising Swiss chocolate or 
condensed milk — I forget which: black cows with 

317 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

white spots, or white cows with black spots, grazing 
contentedly on emerald hillsides, with white mountains 
sticking up behind; rivers meandering through lush, 
green meadows; white farmhouses with red roofs and 
neat, green blinds peering out between the mathemat- 
ically arranged orchard rows. But always there are 
the orchards. No matter how wide you open your 
throttle, no matter how high your speedometer needle 
climbs, you can't escape them. They border the road 
on both sides, for mile after mile after mile, and in the 
spring, when they are in blossom, the countryside looks 
as though it had been struck by a snow-storm — and 
smells like Roger & Gallet's perfumery works. 

When I visited the Southwest the horny-handed 
farmer folk would meet me when I stepped from the 
train and whirl me incredible distances across the 
desert to show me a patch of alfalfa — "the finest patch 
of alfalfa, by jingo, in the whole blamed State!" In 
Oregon they did much the same thing, except, instead 
of showing me alfalfa they showed me apples. Up 
north of the Siskiyous, they're literally apple drunk. 
They talk apples, think apples, dream apples, eat 
apple dumplings and apple pies, drink apple cider 
and apple brandy and applejack. Even their women 
are apple-cheeked. You can't blame them for being 
a trifle boisterous about their apple crops, however, 
when you see what the apple has done for Oregon. I 
was shown one orchard of forty-five acres whose crop 
had sold the preceding year for seventy-five thousand 
dollars. Another orchard of but eight acres brought 

318 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

its owner sixteen thousand dollars. Five hundred 
trees yielded another man five thousand dollars. And 
I could repeat similar instances ad infinitum. They 
assured us in Medford that the apple cellars at Buck- 
ingham Palace and Windsor Castle always contain 
barrels stencilled "Grown in Oregon" — ^which is, I 
believe, a fact — and, though they didn't say so in so 
many words, they intimated that when King George 
feels the need of a bite after a court ball or some equally 
arduous function, he lights a candle and shuffles down 
the cellar stairs in his dressing-gown and slippers and 
gropes about until he finds an Oregon-grown Northern 
Spy or a big, green Newtown Pippin. 

Oregon's success in apple growing — a success that 
has headed the pioneer northwestward as the gold 
craze of '49 started the frontiersman Californiaward — 
is the joint product of work and brains. Where New 
England has given up all thought of saving her orchards, 
Oregon, by tincturing labour with scientific knowledge, 
has founded an industry which is doing for the State 
what wheat did for the Dakotas, what gold did for 
California. What happened to the orchards all through 
New England? There was enough hard work put 
into them. Heaven knows. The old New England 
farmer and his wife slaved to the bone and were even- 
tually trundled away to the insane asylum or the 
cemetery from overwork, from devotion to the arid 
soil. The orchards of New England have been watered 
with blood and sweat and fertilised with blasted hopes. 
The young men were away in the universities acquiring 

319 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

scientific knowledge and learning how to apply that 
knowledge on the farms, and it never occurred to the 
old men that the wearied soil needed some encourage- 
ment, some strengthening, some vivifying, even as 
their spirits did, to bring material and spiritual pros- 
perity. And Oregon has taken to heart and is profit- 
ing by the pathetic example of the New England farmer. 

It is approximately four hundred miles as a motor 
goes from the Columbia to the California line and, as 
our object was to see the country, we spent upward of 
a week upon the journey, stopping as our fancies 
dictated to cast for trout in the swirling rivers, to 
gossip with village folk and farmers, and sometimes 
just to lie on our backs on inviting hillsides and smoke 
and chat and throw pebbles at inquisitive squirrels 
and watch the sunbeams filter through the foliage of 
the trees. That's where the true joy of motoring comes 
in : to be able to stop when and where you please, with- 
out the necessity of having to give any why or where- 
fore, and, when you grow weary of one place, flying 
on again until you find another that tempts you. I 
have never been able to comprehend why those speed 
maniacs who tear through the country so fast that the 
telegraph-poles look like palings in a picket fence 
bother with automobiles at all; they could travel 
quite as fast in a train and ever so much more com- 
fortably. 

From Eugene our course lay south, due south 
through a bountiful and smiling land. We tore down 
yellow highroads between orchard rows as precisely 

320 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

placed and uniform as ranks of Prussian grenadiers; we 
flashed past trim farmhouses overshadowed by huge 
hip-roofed barns which seemed to be bursting with pro- 
duce, as, in fact, they were; we rolled through villages 
so neat and clean and happy that they might have 
served as models for the street-car advertisement of 
Spotless Town; we spun along the banks of sun- 
flecked rivers whose waters were broken by trout 
jumping hungry for the fly; we boomed down forest 
roads so dim and silent that we felt as though we were 
motoring down a cathedral nave; Diamond Peak and 
the white-bonneted Three Sisters came into view and 
disappeared again; until at last, churning our way up 
the tortuous road that cKmbs the Umpqua Range, we 
looked down upon the enchanted valley of the Rogue. 
Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley, 
every foot of which is tilled or tillable, protected on 
every side by mountain walls — on the east by the Cas- 
cades, on the west by the Coast Range, on the north 
by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siski- 
yous; and meandering through this garden valley, 
watering its every corner, the winding, mischievous, 
inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning land. 
But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a 
work-like-the-devil-and-you'U-become-prosperous coun- 
try. The soil and the climate will do as much for the 
farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere else in the world, 
but he must do his share. And no one should buy a 
ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employ- 
ment in any line. Jobs are not lying loose on the 

321 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

streets, waiting for some one to come along and pick 
them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New 
York. I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman 
with no other capital than his two hands has much to 
gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects, it is 
true, require many labourers, and these openings 
often present themselves; but the means of bringing 
in workmen are just as cheap and rapid as in other 
sections of the country, so it need not be expected that 
there would be any great difference in wages. The 
chief advantages that Oregon offers to labouring peo- 
ple without sufficient accumulations to give them a 
start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of 
damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportuni- 
ties as good, though perhaps no better, than any other 
State. If, however, he has been able to accumulate 
anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars, 
he is then in a position to avail himself of the innu- 
merable opportunities which exist for men of small 
capital. Such men will find their best opportunities 
in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home 
upon it, and then "going in," as the English say, for 
fruit growing or poultry raising or dairying or market- 
gardening. As sawmills are as plentiful in Oregon as 
pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State 
contains one fifth of all the standing timber in the 
country (you didn't know that, did you?) lumber is 
extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material for a 
comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not 
running to more than one hundred and fifty dollars. 

322 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

It is a mistake for the intending emigrant to count on 
getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act, 
for, though the total government lands open to home- 
stead entry in Oregon are greater in area than the entire 
State of West Virginia, they are, for the most part, in 
the least desirable portions of the State and the settler 
who occupied them would have to pay the price inci- 
dent to life in a remote and semicivilised region. On 
the other hand, excellent land, within easy reach of 
towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of west- 
ern Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and 
fifty dollars an acre, and this would, I am convinced, 
prove the best investment in the end. 

There is no space to dwell at any length on the 
towns of western Oregon — Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, 
Drain, Grant's Pass, Medford, Ashland. All of these 
towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and 
homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops; 
up-to-the-minute educational, lighting, and sewage 
systems; about double the number of parks, hotels, 
garages, and moving-picture houses that you would 
find in towns of similar size in the East; and boards 
of trade and chambers of commerce with enough sur- 
plus energy and enthusiasm to make a booster out of 
an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns pro- 
hibition reigns, and, though, to be quite truthful, I am 
not accustomed to raise an admonishing hand when 
some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly 
remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more 
orderly — in short, pleasanter places to live — than those 

323 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

whose streets are dotted by the famihar swinging 
half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm to 
business is best proved by the fact that the very 
merchants who in the beginning were its most bitter 
assailants have become its most ardent advocates. 
After comparing the "dry" towns of Oregon to the 
"wet" ones — say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in 
California — it seems to me that, so far as the smaller 
rural communities are concerned, at least, there is only 
one side to the prohibition question. 

Thirty miles from Grant's Pass, in the fastnesses 
of the Siskiyous, are the recently discovered mammoth 
caves, which some genius in the art of appellation has 
christened "The Marble Halls of Oregon." It needed 
an inspiration to conceive a name like that ! Such a 
name would induce one to make a trip to see a hole in 
a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these Oregonian 
caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they 
are very far from having been completely explored, 
sufficient investigations have been made to prove con- 
clusively that they are much superior, both in size and 
beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit 
to which was considered as essential for every well- 
travelled American half a century ago as to have seen 
the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls. 

Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled 
forests, and its coast-line rich in bays and coves and 
beaches, possesses all the requisites for one of the 
world's great playgrounds, but some years must pass 

324 




Trout fishing in the high Sierras. 




Salmon fishing in a Northwestern river. 
WHERE RODS BEND DOUBLE AND REELS GO WHIR-R-R-R. 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that 
class of summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe 
trunks. With less than one fifteenth of its sixty odd 
million acres under cultivation, it is still to a great 
extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier's 
crudities and discomforts and, for a man who knows 
and loves the open, with all of a frontier country's 
charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the 
farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of 
big, red apples in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue 
and the real-estate boosters who are so frantically 
chopping town sites out of the primeval forest within 
cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that 
this is still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, 
and will be for a number of years to come. Barring 
the system which parallels the coast from north to 
south and the one which cuts across its northeast 
corner, there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness 
of population and the peculiarly savage nature of a 
great portion of the country having offered few induce- 
ments to the railroad builders. This condition is 
changing rapidly, however, for the transcontinental 
systems which enter the State are working overtime 
to give it population, cities and towns and villages 
are springing up Hke mushrooms along its many water- 
ways, the vast grants held by the railway and trading 
companies and by the pioneers are gradually being 
cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is being 
slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change 
in the conditions which have heretofore prevailed. 

325 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

But it has not yet, thank Heaven, reached that stage 
of civilisation which is characterised by summer hotels 
with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans 
of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place 
of these sophisticated and ostentatious summer resorts 
are the unpretentious inns and camps and summer 
colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore 
from the mouth of the Columbia to the California line. 
The easiest way to reach this summer land is to 
take the little jerk- water railroad which meanders 
eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line townlet fifty miles 
or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County to 
the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumul- 
tuous Nehalem, stopping every now and then, as the 
fancy seems to strike it, at shrieking sawmills or at 
groups of slab-walled loggers' shacks set down in clear- 
ings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men 
come out and swap stories and tobacco with the en- 
gineer. After a time the woods begin to dwindle into 
tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these merge 
gradually into farms, with neat white houses and 
orderly rows of fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle 
grazing contentedly in clover meadows. Quite soon 
Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows 
give way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in 
beaches of yellow sand so much like those which border 
Cape Cod and Buzzard's Bay that it is hard to believe 
that one is not on the coast of New England. From 
the names of the towns and from the types of faces 
that I saw, I gathered that much of this country was 

326 



A FRONTIER ARCADY 

settled by New Englanders, who must have found in 
its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate 
stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much 
to remind them of home. Oregon is, as a glance at the 
map will show you, in exactly the same latitude as the 
New England States and has the same cool, invigorat- 
ing summer weather that one finds in Maine, though 
its winters, thanks to the warm Japan current which 
sweeps along its shores, are characterised by rains in- 
stead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the rail- 
road hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the 
Pacific rises and falls languorously under a genial sun; 
on the other the line of rugged hills, in their shaggy 
mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here and 
there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind- 
bent trees, or a river, complaining noisily at the delay 
to which it has been subjected, finds a devious way 
through the hindering hill range to the waiting ocean. 
Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those 
of the sea alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast 
bear, panther, wildcats, deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, 
and geese are to be found, while the mountain streams 
are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly. 
It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined 
feet have trod the famous Indian trail which was once 
the only route from the wilds of southern Oregon to 
the fur-post which the first Astor established at the 
mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, 
and here and there along the coast are the remains of 
the forts and trading stations which the Russians, in 

327 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

their campaign for the commercial mastery of the 
Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to 
the Bay of San Francisco. The lives led by those who 
summer along this shore would delight such rugged 
apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John 
Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a grati- 
fying absence of fashionable hotels and luxurious 
camps and cottages, though there is an abundance of 
unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. 
The people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere 
apologised profusely for Oregon's deficiencies in this 
respect and assured me very earnestly that in two or 
three years more the State would have a complete 
assortment of summer hotels "as good as anything 
you'll find at Atlantic City or Narragansett Pier, by 
George." All I have to say is that when their promises 
are realised, Oregon's chiefest and most distinctive 
charm — its near-to-nature simplicity — will have dis- 
appeared, and, so far as the traveller and the pleasure 
seeker are concerned, it will be merely an indifferent 
imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At 
present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep- 
on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel- 
shir t-and-slouch -hat land. Even as I write I can hear 
its insistent, subtle summons in my ears : the whisper of 
the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the 
ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk 
of paddles, the creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: 
"Cut loose from towns and men; pack your kit and 
come again." And that's precisely what I'm going to do. 

328 



XII 
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 



"They rise to mastery of wind and snow; 
They go like soldiers grimly into strife 
To colonise the plain. They plough and sow, 

And fertilise the sod with their own life, 
As did the Indian and the buffalo." 



XII 

BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

WHEN white men in Africa make long desert 
journeys on camel-back, they follow the example 
of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest 
to hips with bandages like those with which trainers 
wrap the legs of race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly 
but plainly, is done to prevent their bursting from the 
violent and sustained shaking to which they are sub- 
jected by the roughness of the camel's gait. When I 
said good-bye to the Sudan, taking it for granted that 
I would have no further use for my spiral corselet in 
the presumably civilised country to which I was going, 
I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know 
that I would need it far more than I ever had in Africa 
while journeying in so essentially Occidental a convey- 
ance as a motor-car through a region where camels 
are confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertise- 
ments? But long before we had traversed the forty 
atrocious miles which make the distance between 
Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like 
four hundred, I would have given a good deal to have 
had my racked and aching body snugly wrapped in 
it again. I have had more than a speaking acquain- 
tance with some roads so bad that they ought to have 

23^ 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

been in jail — in Asiatic Turkey and in Baja California 
and in other places — ^but to the Portland-Kalama road 
I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. 
Roll down a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an 
electric churn and tell the dairyman to turn on the 
power; ride a bicycle across a railroad trestle and you 
will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of 
discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours 
of this sort of thing, we bumped our way down a par- 
ticularly vicious bit of hill road, every joint and bolt 
in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a 
prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning 
comfortably over the front gate, interestedly watching 
our progress. 

"St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute," I chattered to the 
chauffeur, as we jounced into the thank-ye-marms and 
rattled over the loose stones, "I w-w-want to t-t-t-t-ell 
this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad." 

As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, 
taking a straw out of his mouth, drawled: 

"Say, stranger, you might like to know that you've 
just come over the most gol-damnedest piece of road 
north o' Panama." 

So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this 
portion of the State of Washington have repaired the 
road since we passed over it, I would advise those 
automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the 
Oregon side of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think 
that is the name of the tiny hamlet), where they can 
put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to tow 

332 



r- 

t 

i 

1 


!|/^ 






f ^ ''' !■■■■- . :.--y'^^''" : ^ ? •:;-;^ ■ ^ii^ 


[ '^M 


i 




I -J 




BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them 
five dollars, but it's worth it. 

Were one to prejudge a country by the names of 
its villages and towns and counties he would form a 
peculiar conception of Washington, for I do not recall 
ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the 
names which some one — the Siwash aborigine, presum- 
ably — has wished upon it. How would you like to get 
this sort of a reply to your question as to some one's 
antecedents? "Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, 
down in Klickitat County, and I met my wife, whose 
folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla Walla, and 
later on we moved to Puyallup, but I've a sort of no- 
tion of goin' into the cannery business at Skamokawa, 
over in Wahkiakum County, though the wife, she's been 
a-pesterin' me to buy an apple orchard up in the Okano- 
gan." Still, it's more interesting to motor through a 
country like that, always wondering what bizarre, 
heathenish name is going to turn up next, than to tour 
through a region sprinkled with Simpson's Centres 
and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and 
Hickory Hollows until you feel as though you were an 
actor in "The Old Homestead." 

Throughout our trip through Washington we were 
caused untold annoyance, and in several instances 
were compelled to travel many weary and needless 
miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign- 
posts by amateur marksmen. Up in that country 
every boy gets a gun with his first pair of pants, and, 
when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target 

333 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected 
for the benefit of tourists. More than once, coming 
to a crossroads in the forest, we found these placards 
so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess 
which road to take — and we usually guessed wrong. 
"I wish to goodness," said my friend in exasperation, 
after we had gone half a dozen miles out of our way on 
one of these occasions, "that they would declare a close 
season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then 
give the man the limit who is caught shooting them." 
It would be a grave injustice to place undue em- 
phasis upon the crudities and inconveniences which 
annoy the traveller in certain portions of Washington, 
for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers 
are still wrestling with the wilderness — and in most 
instances they have had to put up a desperate resis- 
tance to keep the wilderness from shoving them off the 
mat. We passed through many a community, far 
removed from the railway (for the railway builders 
have done little more than nibble at the crust of the 
Washington pie) where the people were living under 
conditions almost identical with those which confronted 
the Pilgrim settlers of New England. Many a farm- 
stead that we passed was chopped out of the virgin 
forest, the house being built from the trees that had 
grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern 
or Middle Western farmer knows the term, seemed 
almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps rose 
everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. 
''There's so danged many stumps in this country," 

334 



BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

one of these pioneer farmers remarked, "that some- 
times I think that the Lord never intended for it to be 
cleared at all." The problem of getting rid of these 
stumps is one of the most perplexing with which the 
Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense of 
clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy- 
five dollars an acre. So inimical to colonisation has 
the question of land clearing become, indeed, that the 
State has found it necessary to step in and finance the 
stump-pullers in districts established in accordance 
with recent legislation. Though Washington is a coun- 
try of hustle and hard work, no one who spends any 
length of time in it can fail to be impressed with the 
belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, 
as a whole, attractive. Though the cold is never 
extreme, the climate does not lack vigour, and, as a 
result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of moisture. 
'^We call 'em Oregon mists," a farmer explained to me, 
"because they missed Oregon and hit here." They 
are really more of a fog than a rain, and no one pays 
the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk 
scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with 
the verdancy of the vegetation and the pink-and-white 
complexions of the women, constantly reminded me of 
Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast 
to the arroyos secos to which we became accustomed 
in many parts of California are the streams of Wash- 
ington, which flow throughout the year, enough water- 
power going to waste annually to run a plant that 
would supply the nation. 

335 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hun- 
dred and fifty miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we 
made a slight detour so as to see Olympia, which is the 
capital of the State. Beyond its rococo State-house, 
which is surmounted by a statue of a female — it might 
be Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her 
peignoir — there is nothing to distinguish Olympia 
from any one of a score of other pretty little towns 
whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. 
Because there was a moon in the heavens as big and 
yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to push on to 
Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that 
night. I'll not soon forget the beauty of that ride. 
With our engines purring like a contented cat we 
boomed down the radiant path that our headlights 
cut out of the darkness; the night air, charged with 
balsamic fragrance, beat in our faces; the black walls 
of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the tree 
tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled 
lane of sky. I wish you might have been there ... it 
was so enchanting and mysterious. 

The theatres were vomiting their throngs of play- 
goers when we rolled under the row of electric arches 
which turns Tacoma's chief thoroughfare into an ave- 
nue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque 
and towering totem-pole in the square in front of our 
hotel. Tacoma is as up-and-doing a city as you will 
find in a week's journey through a busy land. It does 
not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to 
be kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of 



BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

terraces rising above an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, 
instead of defying the steepness of the hills, as do those 
of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them in long 
diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Termi- 
nal in New York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in 
being girdled by a series of so-called natural parks, a 
zone ten miles in width in which the landscape archi- 
tect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and 
woods and wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the 
Creator. But Tacoma's chief boast and glory is, of 
course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped cone, 
which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, 
rises like an ermine-mantled monarch above the en- 
circling forest. The name of the mountain is Rainier 
or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle 
or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in 
progress between the people of the two cities over the 
question for some time, the citizens of Seattle claiming 
that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as an 
asset in Tacoma's municipal advertising campaign, 
while the people of the latter city assert that, as the 
British Admiral Rainier, for whom the peak was 
originally named, fought against the Americans in the 
Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked 
onto an American mountain. 

For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma 
to Mount Rainier (for that is the name to which the 
Federal Government has given its approval) strikes 
across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, 
until, reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps 

337 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

upward in long and graceful spirals which were laid 
out by army engineers, for the region has been taken 
over by the government under its new and admirable 
policy of protecting the beauty-spots of the country 
through the formation of national parks. Nowhere, 
not even in the Alps, have I driven over a finer moun- 
tain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves 
so skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, 
upon reaching National Park Inn, in the heart of the 
reservation, that he has climbed upward of five thou- 
sand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We 
spent the night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced 
tavern which has an air of cosiness and comfort in 
keeping with the surroundings. Everything about it 
reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, 
and when I drew up the shade in the morning the illu- 
sion was complete, for the great peak, its snow-clad 
flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered 
above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, 
dazzling, majestic, sublime. Leaving the Inn after an 
early breakfast, we motored up the mountain road as 
far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which 
is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my 
word for it, this glacier — the largest on the continent 
outside of Alaska — is one of the most worth-while 
sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long 
and half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the 
mountain like a mammoth boa-constrictor whose prog- 
ress has been barred in other directions by the encir- 
cling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier's 

338 



BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

snout, and, after an hour's hard climbing over loose 
rubble and slippery rock, succeeded, in defiance of 
the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of rock from 
which we could look directly down upon the ice tor- 
rent, and there we ate the lunch that we had brought 
with us to the accompaniment of the intermittent 
crashes which marked the glacial torrent's slow advance. 

We descended to the road in time to catch the 
four-horse stage which runs twice daily from the Inn 
to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that we 
must visit, "because," she said, "there are snow-fields 
and fields of wild flowers side by side." 

"But you've seen much the same sort of thing 
in Switzerland," I objected. "Don't you remember 
that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I think 
it was, where people in furs were skating on one side 
of the hotel and other people were having tea under 
big red parasols on the other?" 

"I remember it, of course," she answered, "but 
that was in Switzerland and this is in my own coun- 
try, which makes all the difference in the world. Evi- 
dently you have forgotten that German baron we met 
at Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn't think that the 
view from Paradise Valley was finer than the one from 
Andermatt, and we had to admit that we didn't know 
where Paradise Valley was. I'm not going to let that 
sort of thing happen again. The next time I meet a 
foreigner I'm not going to be embarrassed to death 
by finding that he knows more about my own country 
than I know myself." 

339 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

So she had her way and, leaving the car behind 
us, we took the creaking stage up the steep and narrow 
road to the valley, where we gathered armf uls of wild 
flowers one minute and pelted each other with snow- 
balls the next, and peered through the telescope — at a 
quarter a look — at the thirteen glaciers which radiate 
from the mountain's summit, and aroused perfectly 
shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only health- 
ily tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half 
intoxicated with the combination of blazing sunlight 
and sparkHng mountain air, we rattled down again to 
the Inn and the waiting car. 

The run from Rainier National Park, through 
Tacoma, to Seattle is as smooth and exhilarating as 
sliding down the banisters of the front stairs. Auto- 
intoxicated by the perfection of the roads, I stepped on 
the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car 
suddenly leaped into its stride and hurtled down the 
highway at express-train speed, while farmhouses and 
barns and fields and orchards swept by us in an indis- 
tinguishable blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But 
out of the distance came racing toward us a big white 
placard, "City Limits of Seattle," and I slowed down 
to a pace more conformable with the law and rolled 
over the miles of trestles which span the swamps and 
lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a 
motor-cycle poHceman had his eye upon us. The 
builders of Seattle must have been men of resource as 
well as courage, for those portions of the city that have 
not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been 

340 



BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

blasted out of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives 
one the impression of clinging precariously to a slip- 
pery mountain slope midway between sea and sky. 
Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Ta- 
coma, the streets go storming up them at angles which 
give a motorist much the same sensation a rider has 
when his horse rears and threatens to fall over back- 
ward. Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with 
teeming streets and huge department stores and miles 
of harbour frontage and one of the tallest sky-scrapers 
in existence and a park and boulevard system probably 
unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of 
being a little crude, a trifle nouveau riche, and not yet 
entirely at home in its resplendent garments. Be- 
tween Seattle and Portland the most intense rivalry 
exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as 
regards population, although this assertion will be 
indignantly denied by the citizens of both of them. 
Standing at one of the world's crossways, the terminus 
of several transcontinental railways and several trans- 
Pacific steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the 
recognised gateway to Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous 
commercial advantage over her Oregonian rival, but 
from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely 
situated on the Willamette near its junction with the 
Columbia, with its milder climate, its greater number of 
theatres and hotels, and its older society, has rather a 
more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air 
than its northern neighbour. 

Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound 
341 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

country, that wilderness of mountains, glaciers, for- 
ests, lakes, lagoons, islands, bays, and inlets which 
makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the 
United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an 
easy country to describe. Southward from the Straits 
of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long arm of the Pacific 
penetrates the State of Washington — that is Puget 
Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle 
and Tacoma, at the head of the sound is Olympia, the 
capital of the State, and bordering the western shore 
rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic 
Range. If your imagination will stand the further 
strain of picturing an archipelago four times the size 
of the Thousand Islands, clothed with forests of cedar, 
fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays, har- 
bours, coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body 
of water, you will have a hazy conception of the island 
labyrinth of Puget Sound, which is generally admitted, 
I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water estuary 
in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its 
channels, the water is so deep and the banks so precipi- 
tous that at many points a ship's side would touch the 
shore before its keel would touch the ground, which, 
taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent 
harbours, makes it the most ideal cruising ground for 
power-boats on our coasts. 

I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting 
summer than one spent in a well-powered, well-stocked 
motor-boat cruising in and about this archipelago, 
loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one, 

342 



BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a 
week, as one pleased. There are deer and bear in the 
forests and trout in the rivers and salmon in the deeper 
waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient recrea- 
tion, one could run across to the mainland and get the 
stiffest kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus 
or Mount Rainier. During the summer months scores 
of small steamers, the "mosquito fleet," ply out of 
Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward 
between the city wharfs and the fishing villages, farm- 
ing communities, lumber camps, sawmills, and summer 
resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archi- 
pelago's inland waterways, so that the camper on their 
shores, seemingly far off in the wilds, need never be 
without his daily paper, his fresh vegetables, or his 
mail. 

Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining — for, 
to my way of thinking, there is about as much enjoy- 
ment to be had in imagination as in realisation — that 
we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no busi- 
ness worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have 
the deck of a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and 
that the placid, island-dotted waters of Puget Sound 
lie before us, asparkle on a summer's morning. Leav- 
ing Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the 
grim, grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Brem- 
erton Navy Yard abeam, we will push the wheel to 
starboard and point the nose of our craft toward Ad- 
miralty Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the 
open sea. Our first port of call will be, I think, at 

343 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Dungeness, whose waters are the habitat of those 
Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and deplete 
the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San 
Diego. At the back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie, 
whose seventy odd thousand acres of irrigated lands 
produce "those great big baked potatoes" which are so 
prominent an item on dining-car menus in the North- 
west. It is nothing of a run from Dungeness to Port 
Angeles, which is the most convenient gateway to the 
unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles south- 
ward from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of 
which is by ferry across the beautiful mountain Lake 
Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel of moun- 
tain engineering, are the Sol Due Hot Springs, whose 
great modern hotel is in startling contrast to the sav- 
agery of the region which surrounds it. Laying our 
course from Port Angeles straight into the setting sun, 
we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores 
of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew 
of Macah Indians will take us in one of their frail 
canoes close around the harsh face of Cape Flattery, 
which is the extreme northwest corner of the United 
States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go, 
for beyond it lies the open sea; but, steering eastward 
again, we can nose about at will, loitering through the 
romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario Straits, 
dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a 
considerable portion of the world with salmon, and 
coming thus to Friday Harbour, the county-seat of the 
San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson Crusoe- 

344 



BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

ness of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint, 
old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of 
Maine. The San Juan Islands, which are a less civilised 
and more beautiful edition of the Thousand Islands of 
the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the other 
side of the continent, lie midway between the American 
and the Canadian shores. They were the scene of 
numerous exciting incidents in the boundary dispute 
of the late fifties, being for a number of years jointly 
occupied by British and American troops; but, though 
several crumbling British blockhouses still rise above 
the island harbours, the nearest British soil is Vancouver 
Island, across the Strait of Georgia. That the Stars 
and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day over 
this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough, 
to the Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser, 
who was asked to act as arbitrator between England 
and the United States and decided in favour of the 
latter. 

Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting- 
goods store only to find yourself so bewildered by the 
amazing number and variety of implements for sports 
and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you 
scarcely knew what to choose ? Well, that is precisely 
the sensation I had the first time I visited the Puget 
Sound country. I felt as though I had been turned 
loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many 
things to choose from that I couldn't make up my mind 
which to take first. And, mark you, everything is 
comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants to 

345 



THE END OF THE TRAH. 

get some mountain cKmbing he has to go to Chamonix 
or Zermatt, which means a journey of at least two 
days. If, getting his fill of precipices and glaciers and 
crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn 
his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which wall 
require seven or eight days more. Should he suddenly 
take it into his head that he would Hke some salmon 
fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hun- 
dred dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing 
streams of Norway — and then pay a good round sum 
for the privilege of fishing in them when he gets there. 
On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or 
motor-car and reach the slopes of the second highest 
peak in the United States, a mountain higher and more 
difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as quickly and as 
easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie. 
From Seattle one can reach the country of the big 
grizzHes as easily as a Boston sportsman can reach 
the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island capital 
of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as 
smooth as a biUiard-table will take one to the banks 
of a stream where the salmon are too large to be 
weighed on pocket scales in less time than a Chicagoan 
spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia. 

There is no other region of equal size, so far as I 
am aware, which offers so many worth-while things in 
a superlative degree for red-blooded people to do. 
Where else, pray, can you cHmb a mountain which is 
higher than any peak in Europe save one (Mount 
Hooker, in British Columbia, is only eighty feet lower 

346 



BREAKING THE \MLDERXESS 

than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the x\lps, while Zvlount 
Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Ta- 
coma's front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than 
the Jungfrau); where else can you look along your 
rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly, elk, panther, 
mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest 
of all North American big game; where else can you 
have your fly-rod bent like a sapHng in a storm and 
hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a sixty-pound 
salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise, 
for weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago 
more beautiful than those of Georgian Bay and more 
numerous than those of the /Egean, without the neces- 
sity of ever dropping anchor twice in the same har- 
bour; where else can you canoe by day and camp by 
night along rivers which have their sources on the roof 
of a contiaent and, after taking their course through a 
thousand miles of wildemess, empty into the greatest 
of the oceans; where else can you throw open the 
throttle of your motor on a macadamised highway 
which, iQ another year or two, wiU stretch its length 
across twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking ^Mexico 
viith Alaska? \\'Tiere else can you find such amuse- 
ments as these, I ask ? Answer me that. 

Were it not for the compKcated customs formali- 
ties that a motorist has, perforce, to go through at the 
Canadian border, one could, by getting an early start 
and not lingering over his lunch, make the one-hundred- 
and-seventy-mile journey from Seattle to \'ancouver 

347 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

between dawn and dark of the same day. But the red 
tape which the American officials insist upon unwind- 
ing before you can leave the land of the beef trust 
and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal 
amount of red tape which the Canadian officials wind 
up before you are permitted to enter the dominions 
of his gracious Majesty King George make a one- 
day trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably 
in two and spent the intervening night in the seaport 
town of Bellingham. It's a great place for canneries, 
is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the resi- 
dents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face. 
Twenty miles farther on, at a hamlet called Blaine, we 
were greeted by a huge sign whose staring letters 
read: "International Boundary." On one side the 
Stars and Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty; 
on the other side of this imaginary but significant line 
the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over a shanty a 
trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British cus- 
toms officials, and when they had finished with our 
car there wasn't much they didn't know about it. 
They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir is inspected 
when he knocks off work in a South African diamond 
mine. Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain 
from the American authorities at the border a certifi- 
cate containing a description of your car and all that it 
contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumer- 
able formalities upon entering the country again, while 
the Canadian laws require that a tourist desiring to 
remain more than eight days in the Dominion must 

348 



BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 

provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make 
in addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of 
which will be returned to him when he leaves the coun- 
try. There is a grocer in Blaine — I forget his name, 
but he is a most obliging fellow — ^who makes a spe- 
cialty of providing bonds for motorists, and by going to 
him we saved ourselves much trouble. It was all very 
informal. He simply called up the Canadian customs 
house on the phone and said: "Say, Bill, there's some 
folks here that's motorin' into Canada. I ain't got 
time to make out a bond just now, 'cause there's an 
old lady here waitin' to buy some potatoes, but you 
just let 'em skip through and I'll fix it up the next time 
I see you." Careless and informal, just like that. So 
all they did was to take the pedigree of the car for four 
generations, note the numbers of the spare tires, in- 
ventory the extra parts, go through our belongings 
with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what 
the E. in my name stood for, and was I unfortunate 
enough to have to pay taxes; and, after presenting me 
with a fist of the pains and penalties which I would 
incur if I broke any of his Majesty's orders in council, 
permitted us to enter the territory of the Dominion. 

I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire 
tracks, that the fifty miles of highway between Blaine 
and Vancouver has been materially improved since we 
went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in 
the world, they had constructed a "crowned" road, 
which, as its name implies, is one that is rounded up- 
ward in the middle so as to drain the more readily; 

349 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so 
greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty 
that I kept the car from sliding into the ditch. There 
is one thing that the motorist must bear constantly in 
mind from the moment his front tires roll across the 
Canadian border, and that is keep to the left. Barring 
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, British Columbia 
is the only Canadian province which retains the En- 
glish system of turning to the left and passing to the 
right, and it takes an American some time to become 
habituated to it. 

After seemingly endless miles of slippery going 
through dripping woods, we entered the outskirts of 
New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near the mouth 
of the Eraser and the oldest place in this region, as age 
is counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard, 
twenty-five miles long, connects New Westminster with 
Vancouver, and the car fled along it as swiftly as an 
aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest 
dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where 
gangs of men were still at work dynamiting and burn- 
ing the stumps; and on the cleared land neat cottages 
of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed 
gradually to two-storied, frame houses, and these again 
to the increasingly ornate mansions of the well-to-do, 
the wealthy, and the rich. Through the murk be- 
yond them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot 
skyward — memorials to the men who have roped and 
tied and tamed a savage land. 



3SO 



XIII 
CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 



"Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers- 
Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains, 
Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers 
And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains. 
Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between 'em; 

Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour; 
Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that 
screen 'em — 
Saw the plant to feed a people — up and waiting for the power ! " 



XIII 

CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

|ARKNESS had fallen on the Oregonian forest 
when our forward tire exploded with a report 
which sounded in that eerie stillness like a bursting 
shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blow- 
out — in the heart of a forest as large as many a Euro- 
pean kingdom, with the nearest settlement half a hun- 
dred miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel 
as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of 
the pines, however, I glimpsed a signal of human 
presence in the twinkling of a fire, and toward it I 
made my way through underbrush and over fallen 
trunks, while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his 
breath, busied himself at the maddening task of fit- 
ting on another tire in the darkness. 

I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene 
which greeted me as I halted on the edge of a little 
clearing fitfully illuminated by a roaring camp-fire. 
Within the circle of warmth — ^for the summer nights 
are chilly in the north country — stood a canvas-topped 
wagon which appeared to be a half-brother to a prairie- 
schooner, an uncle to an army ambulance, and a cousin 
to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down, 
so that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated 

353 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

beside it on an upended soap box a plump little woman 
in a calico dress was preparing six small youngsters 
for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a New 
England farmhouse, with the neighbours' lights twin- 
kling through the trees, instead of in the middle of a 
primeval wilderness, a long day's journey from any- 
where. The horses had been outspanned, as they say 
in South Africa, and were placidly exploring the re- 
cesses of their nose-bags for the last stray grains of 
oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed man, 
who had been squatting beside the fire watching the 
slow progress of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet 
on my approach and slouched forward with outstretched 
hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality and an 
air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked 
him. 

"Howdy, friend," he drawled, with the unmis- 
takable nasal twang of the Middle West. "I reckon 
you've had a little bad luck with your machine, ain't 
you? We heard you a-comin' chug-chuggin' through 
the woods, hell bent for election, an' all to once there 
was a noise 's if some one had pulled the trigger of 
a shotgun. 'There,' says I to Arethusa, 'some pore 
autermobile feller's limpin' 'round in the darkness on 
three legs,' says I, 'an' as soon's I get this coffee to 
boilin' I reckon I'll stroll over with a lantern an' see 
if I can't give him some help.' " 

"Just as much obliged," said I, "but my man has 
the tire pretty well on by now. But we could do with 
a cup or so of that coffee if you've some to spare." 

354 





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This settler's nearest neighbour was fifty miles away^ 




And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife. 
OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION. 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

"That's what coffee's for, friend — to drink," he 
said cordially, reaching for a tin cup. " Where' ve you 
come from?" he added with polite curiosity. 

"From the Mexican border," said I, with, I sus- 
pect, a trace of self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen 
hundred miles of desert, forest, and mountains lay 
behind us. "And you?" I asked in turn. 

" Us ? " he answered. " Oh, we've come from Kan- 
sas." (He said it as unconcernedly as a New Yorker 
might mention that he had just run over to Philadel- 
phia for a day.) "Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago 
come Thursday and have averaged nigh on twenty- 
five miles a day ever since. An' the horses ain't in bad 
condition, neither." 

"And where, in the name of Heaven," I exclaimed, 
"are you going?" 

"Well," was the reply, "we're headed for British 
Columbia, but I reckon we'll have to winter some- 
wheres in Washington and push on across the line in 
the spring. You see, friend," he continued, in his 
placid, easy-going manner, in reply to my rapid fire 
of inquiries, "it was this way. I was in the furniture 
business back in Kansas, furniture an' undertakin', 
but I didn't much care for the business 'cause it kept 
me indoors so much, my folks always havin' been 
farmers and such like. Well, one day a while back, I 
picked up one of them folders sent out by the Cana- 
dian Gov'ment, tellin' 'bout the rich resources up in 
British Columbia, an' how land was to be had for 
the askin'. So that night when I went home I says to 

355 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Arethusa: ' What'd you think of sellin' out an' packin' 
up and goin' up British Columbia way, an' gettin' a 
farm where we can live out o' doors an' make a decent 
livin' ? ' ' Sure,' says she, ' I'd like it fine. An' it'll 
be great for the kids.' 'All right,' says I, 'it's all de- 
cided. I'll build a body for the delivery wagon that 
we can sleep in, an' we'll take Peter an' Repeater, the 
delivery team, an' it won't take us more than six or 
eight months to make the trip if we keep movin'.' 
You see, friend," he added, "my paw moved out to 
Kansas when there warn't nothin' there but Indians 
an' sage-brush, an' hers did, too, so I reckon this 
movin' on to new places is sort of in the blood." 

" But why British Columbia ? " I queried. " Why 
Canada at all ? What's the reason that you, an Ameri- 
can, don't remain in the United States?" 

"Well, I don't know exactly, friend," he answered, 
a little shamefacedly, I thought, "unless it's because 
it's a newer country up there an' a man has a better 
chance. What with the Swedes an' the Germans an' 
the EyetaUans, this country's gettin' pretty well set- 
tled an' there ain't the chances in it there was once; 
but up British Columbia way it's still a frontier coun- 
try, they tell me, an' a man who's willin' to buckle 
down an' work can make a home an' a good livin' 
quicker'n anywhere else, I guess. It's fine land up in 
the middle o' Vancouver Island, I hear, an' in the Cari- 
boo country, too, an' they want settlers so darn bad 
that they'll give you a farm for nothin'. An' it's a 
pretty good country for a man to five in, too. Here in 

356 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

the United States we do a heap o' talkin' 'bout our laws, 
but up in Canada they don't talk about 'em at all — 
they just go right ahead an' enforce 'em. I may be in 
wrong, of course, but from all I hear it's goin' to be a 
great country up there one of these days, when they 
get the railroads through, an' me an' Arethusa sorta 
got the notion in our heads that we'd like to be pioneers, 
like our paws were, an' get in an' help build the coun- 
try, an' let our kids grow up with it. You've got to 
be startin', eh? Won't you have another cup o' coffee 
before you go? Well, friend, I'm mighty glad to've 
met you. Good luck to you." 
"Good luck to you^^ said I. 

Though I didn't appreciate it at the time, my 
acquaintance of the forest was a soldier in an army of 
invasion. This army had come from the south quietly, 
unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of 
drum, its weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe 
and the spade, its object the conquest, not of a people 
but of a wilderness. Have you any conception, I 
wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agri- 
cultural invasion of Canada has assumed? Did you 
know that last year upward of one hundred thousand 
Americans crossed the border to take up farms and 
carve out fortunes for themselves under another flag? 
These settlers who are trekking northward by rail and 
road are the very pick of the farming communities of 
our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid 
character and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty 

357 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

that is characteristic of those closely associated with 
the soil, they take with them a substantial amount of 
capital — ^probably a thousand dollars at least, on an 
average, either in cash, stock, or household goods. 
Moreover, they bring what is most valuable of all — ■ 
experience. Coming from a region where the agri- 
cultural conditions are similar to those prevailing in 
the Canadian West, they quickly adapt themselves to 
the new life. Unlike the settlers from the mother coun- 
try and from the Continent, to whom everything is 
strange and new, and who consequently require some 
time to adjust themselves to the changed conditions, 
the American wastes not a moment in contemplation 
but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes 
hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and 
building a home. He is efficient, energetic, industrious, 
businessUke, adaptable, and quite frankly admits that 
he has come to the country because it offers him better 
prospects. So, though he may not sing " God Save the 
King" with the fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is 
none the less valuable to the land of his adoption. 

Ask your average well-informed American what 
he knows about British Columbia, and it is dollars to 
doughnuts that he will remark rather dubiously: "Oh, 
yes, that's the place where the tinned salmon comes 
from, isn't it ? " Take yourself, for example. Did you 
happen to be aware that, though it has barely as many 
inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area is equal to that 
of California, Oregon, and Washington put together, 
with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or, 

358 




A heavy load but well packed. 



Even the dogs have to carry their share. 




A heavy load poorly packed. 
PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG. 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

if the comparison is more graphic, that it is larger than 
the combined areas of Italy, Switzerland, and France? 
Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising the 
Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards 
of Washington and the mines of Idaho; eastward it 
ends where the cattle-ranges of Alberta begin; to its 
north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories and 
the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered 
by the heaving Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged 
coast which forms the panhandle of Alaska. Though 
clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two great 
cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one 
on the continent, by the way, which runs from tide- 
water to tide-water under the same management and 
the same name) hugs the province's southern border 
and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast 
hinterland, larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms, 
with its network of unnamed rivers and its unguessed- 
at wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals, contains 
thousands upon thousands of square miles which have 
never felt the pressure of a white man's foot or echoed 
to a white man's voice. Do you realise that, should you 
turn your horse's head northwestward from the Koote- 
nai, on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far 
as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you 
could unsaddle beneath the Stars and Stripes at White 
Pass, on the frontier of Alaska? Did you know that 
the province contains the greatest compact area of 
merchantable timber in North America, its forests 
being greater in extent than those of the New England 

359 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, 
Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have 
heard naval experts and railway presidents and mining 
men talk ponderously of a future shortage in the coal 
supply— but they need not worry, for British Columbia's 
coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion 
tons of bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite 
(100,000,000,000, tons in all, if so endless a caravan 
of ciphers means anything to you) — enough to run the 
engines of the world until Gabriel's trumpet sounds 
"Cease working." The output of its salmon canneries 
will provide those who order fish on Fridays with most 
excellent and inexpensive eating until the crack of 
doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hema- 
tite are so extensive that they bid fair to make the 
ironmasters of Pittsburg break that commandment (I 
forget which one it is) which says: "Thou shalt not 
covet thy neighbour's goods." The province has 
enough pulpwood to supply the Hearst and Harms- 
worth presses with paper until the last "extra special 
edition" is issued on the morning of judgment day. 
The recently discovered petroleum deposits have proved 
so large that they promise to materially reduce the 
income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf on 
the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and 
fruit lands in the province is estimated at sixty million 
acres, of which less than one tenth has been taken up, 
much less put under cultivation. And scattered through 
the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din- 
like territory is a total population of less than four 

360 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

hundred thousand souls. Everything considered, it 
has, I suppose, greater natural resources than any area 
of the same size on the globe. So I don't see how a 
young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little 
capital, and a speaking acquaintance with hard work 
could do better than to drop into the nearest railway 
ticket office and say to the clerk behind the counter: 
"A ticket to British Columbia — and step lively, if you 
please. I want to get there before it is too late to be a 
pioneer." 

Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles, 
sheltered from the winter blizzards of the prairie prov- 
inces by the high wall of the Rocky Mountains, its 
long western coast washed by the warm waves of the 
Japan current, its air tinctured with the balsamic 
fragrance of millions of acres of hemlock, spruce, and 
pine, British Columbia's climate is, to use the phrase- 
ology of the real-estate boosters, "highly salubrious"; 
although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add 
that it is extremely wet during a considerable portion 
of the year. But it is a misty, drizzly sort of rain to 
which no one pays the slightest attention. You will 
see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets, 
and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs 
and hotels in a rain which would make a Chicagoan 
hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn up his collar and 
seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh 
good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way: 
"Why, is it raining? By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn't 
it? Really, you know, I hadn't noticed it at all." 

361 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Then they will go on to tell you that it is the moist- 
ness of the cUmate which gives British Columbia its 
beautiful women and its beautiful flowers. And I can, 
and gladly do, vouch for the beauty of them both. 
They — ^particularly the women — are worth going a 
long way to see. 

You mustn't confuse British Columbia, you under- 
stand, with the flat, monotonous, grain-growing prov- 
inces which lie on the other side of the Rockies. It 
isn't that sort of a country at all. It is too mountain- 
ous, too ravined, with many impassable chasms and 
nigh-impenetrable forests. Its plateaus are eroded by 
lake and river into gorges which are younger sisters of 
the Grand Canon of the Colorado. From a little dis- 
tance the mountain slopes look as though they had 
been neatly upholstered in the green plush to which 
the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but, upon 
closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into 
dense forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thou- 
sands of brooks empty into the creeks and hundreds 
of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these mighty 
waterways, the Eraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the 
Columbia, go roaring and booming seaward through 
their rock-walled channels, wasting a million head of 
power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so 
many picturesque and interesting scenes combined 
with such sensational and impressive scenery as along 
the canon of the Lower Eraser. Here the mountains 
of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles 
above the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls 

362 




The Upper Fraser : '' Streams of threaded quicksilver hasten through the valleys as though 
anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns." 




'On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the bleak, barbarian pines.' 
IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND. 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

of the canon being so precipitous and smooth that one 
marvels at the daring and ingenuity of the men who 
built a railway there. As the canon widens, the traveller 
catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold 
on the river bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks 
guiding with their spike-shod poles the course of mile- 
long log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with poised 
salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like 
statues cast in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisa- 
tion begin to appear in the form of hillsides which have 
been cleared and set out to fruit-trees, of Japanese 
truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the 
little yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills, 
and salmon canneries; and so through a region where 
neat hamlets alternate with stretches of primeval for- 
est, until in the distance, looming above the smoke 
pall, the sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear. 

The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the 
commercial capital and a port and railway terminus 
of great industrial importance, and Victoria, the seat of 
government and the centre of provincial society. There 
are also several smaller cities : New Westminster, at the 
mouth of the Eraser and so close to Vancouver that 
it is almost impossible for the stranger to determine 
where the one ends and the other begins; Nanaimo, 
a coal-mining town of considerable importance on 
the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni, 
famous for its salmon fisheries, at the head of an arm 
of the sea extending inland from the western coast; 
Nelson, the chef-lieu of the prosperous fruit-growing 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

district of the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern 
corner of the province; Bella Coola, on a fiord at the 
mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the gateway 
to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian 
Pacific Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the 
Eraser and Nechako Rivers; and Prince Rupert, the 
remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk 
Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the 
coast of British Columbia, forty miles south of the 
Alaskan border, as the Pacific Coast terminus for the 
transcontinental system which has recently been com- 
pleted. 

Between Vancouver and Victoria the most intense 
rivalry exists. They are as jealous of each other as 
two prima donnas singing in the same opera. Van- 
couver is a great and prosperous city, with broad and 
teeming streets, clanging street-cars, rumbling trafiic, 
belching factory chimneys, towering ofiice-buildings, 
extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements, and at- 
tractive residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing 
very startling in all this, were it not for the fact that 
it is all new — twenty years ago there was no such place 
on the map. It is a busy, bustling place, where every 
one seems too much occupied in making fortunes over- 
night to have much time to spare for social ameni- 
ties. There was a land boom on the last time I was in 
Vancouver — in fact, I gathered that it was a perennial 
condition — and prices were being asked (and paid!) 
for town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have 
made an American real-estate agent admit quite frankly 

364 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

that he had not progressed beyond the kindergarten 
stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying 
that within the city Hmits of Vancouver lots are being 
sold which are still covered with virgin forest. Within 
less than two miles of the city hall you can see gangs 
of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the 
primeval forest with which they are covered and blow- 
ing out and burning the stumps. This real-estate boom, 
with its consequent inflation of land values, has had 
a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however, 
for many ordinarily conservative business men, daz- 
zled by visions of sudden wealth, have gone land mad; 
money is difhcult to get, for Canadian banks are pro- 
hibited by law from loaning on real estate; and, like 
so many other towns which have been stimulated by 
artificial means, Vancouver is already beginning to 
show the effects of the inevitable reaction. 

Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness 
counts in the Dominion. It was the seat of government 
when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach. It 
is the residential city of western Canada, and is much 
in vogue as a place of permanent abode for those who 
in any of the nearer provinces "have made their pile," 
for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters and 
socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval 
officers who have retired and wish to get as much as 
possible out of their limited incomes. Victoria is as 
essentially English as Vancouver is American. It is, 
indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner 
of the empire. It has stately government buildings, 

365 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

broad, tree-shaded streets, endless rows of the beam- 
and-plaster villas which one sees in every London 
suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have 
ever seen. Its people spend much of their time on the 
tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and golf-Hnks, and are care- 
ful not to let business interfere with pleasure. That 
is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver 
has swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a 
horse and buggy. Vancouver might aptly be com- 
pared to a hustling, energetic business man who never 
lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is 
always on the job. Victoria, on the contrary, is a 
quietly prosperous, rather sportily inclined old gentle- 
man who is fond of good living and believes that no 
time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has 
a whole-souled contempt for the other. The Victorian 
takes you aside and says: "Oh, yes, Vancouver is pro- 
gressing quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the 
subject really doesn't interest me. The people are so 
impossible, you know. Why, would you believe it, 
my dear fellow, most of them came there without a 
dollar to their names — fact, I assure you. Now they're 
all bally millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it. 
Very worthy folk, no doubt, but scarcely in our class. 
Look here, let's have a drink and then motor out and 
have a round of golf. What say, old chap ? Right-o ! " 
The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back 
of his head, sticks a thumb in the armhole of his waist- 
coat, and with the other hand gives you a resounding 
whack on the shoulder. "Victoria? Pshaw, no one 

366 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

takes Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the 
madam and the kids for the summer. But it's asleep — ■ 
nothing doing — ^no business. Why, say, friend, do you 
know what they do down there ? , They drink afternoon 
tea I Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, 
progressive, wide-awake, up-and-doing burg this side 
of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to spare? 
Then just jump into my car here and I'll nm you out 
and show you a piece of property that you can make a 
fortune on if you buy it quick. Yes, sirree, you can 
get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest your 
money in Vancouver." 

There are not more than ten harbours in the world, 
certainly not more than a dozen at the most, that have 
a right to be spoken of in the same breath with Vic- 
toria's landlocked port. Picking her cautious way 
through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes 
the harbour of Victoria resemble a chemist's retort, 
our vessel swept ahead with stately dehberation, while 
we leaned over the rail in the crispness of the early 
morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly 
spread themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled 
pleasure yachts, dainty as a debutante; impertinent, 
omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive noses 
everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of 
their paint; greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting 
like an expressman who has carried your trunk up- 
stairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic — you can tell 
'em by the scarlet lookout's barrel lashed to the fore 
masthead; rusty freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singa- 

367 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

pore, Heaven knows where; Japanese fishing-boats 
with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists 
love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock- 
headed descendants of the first inhabitants; huge 
twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners outward bound 
for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for 
Victoria boasts of being "the first and last port of call" 
— take my word for it, it's a sight worth seeing, is 
Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We forged 
ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and 
nearer, until we could make out the line of four-horsed 
brakes waiting to rattle those tourists whose time was 
limited to the customary "points of interest," and the 
crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables 
with their helmet straps under their lower lips and 
blue-and-white-striped bands on their sleeves, exactly 
like their fellows in Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. At 
the right the imposing stone fagade of the Parliament 
buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn — as a 
result of the combined warmth and moisture the vege- 
tation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the temperate 
zone; at the left the business portion of the city 
stretched away in stolid and uncompromising brick 
and stone; squarely ahead of us loomed the great 
bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into 
it had we kept straight on, but of course we didn't, 
for the captain yanked a lever on the bridge and bells 
jangled noisily in the engine room, and the vessel, 
turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the 
berth that awaited it Hke a horse entering its accus- 
tomed stall. 

368 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed 
British. Unless you are observing enough to notice 
that the date-lines of the London papers in the Union 
Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never dream 
that you were upward of six thousand miles from Tra- 
falgar Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in 
Seattle. If you still have any lingering doubts as to 
the atmosphere of the place being completely and un- 
reservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled if 
you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of 
the Empress Hotel any afternoon at four o'clock and 
see the knickerbockered sons of Albion engaged in the 
national diversion of drinking tea. When an American 
is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give- 
y ou - my - word - 1 - never - did - this - b ef ore - but - the - ladies- 
dragged-me-into-it air, but your Britisher does it with 
all the matter-of-courseness with which a New Yorker 
orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the earliest 
impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabi- 
tants are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds — 
brought on, you suppose, by the dampness of the cli- 
mate — but after a little it dawns on you that they are 
merely employing the broad A that they brought with 
them from the old country, along with their monocles 
and their beautifully cut riding clothes. In Vancouver, 
on the contrary, you never hear the broad A used at 
all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond 
Street fresh upon him. They have no time for it. 
They are too busy making money. The Victorians, on 
the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about 
the filthy lucre. They are too busy having a good time. 

369 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

They have enough money to be comfortable, and that 
seems to be all they want. That's the plan on which 
the place is run — comfort and pleasure. Most of the 
Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocket- 
books and champagne thirsts. For a man with a 
modest income and an unquenchable thirst for sport 
Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In 
most places it needs a rich man's income to lead the 
sporting life, for game-preserves and salmon rivers 
and polo ponies run into a lot of money, but in Vic- 
toria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, 
for you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo 
for sixty or seventy dollars and a few miles back of 
the city hes one of the greatest fishing and shooting 
regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria 
I found all the banks and business houses closed, and 
flags were flying from every public building, and a 
procession, headed by mounted poHce and a band, 
was coming down the street. "What's going on?" I 
inquired of a deeply interested bystander. "Is it the 
King's birthday or is there royalty in town, or what?" 
"Not on your life!" he answered witheringly. "It's 
the prime minister on his way to open the baseball 
season." 

If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country 
without the expense and trouble of an ocean voyage, 
I doubt if you could do better than to put your car on 
a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with "Victoria" 
pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it, 
you will find Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I 

370 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

should say as un-American) as England; in many re- 
spects it is more English than England itself. Though 
the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very 
great, for civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the 
island's edges, the roads that have been built are un- 
surpassed anywhere. If roads are judged not only by 
their smoothness but by the scenery through which 
they pass, then the highways of Vancouver Island are 
in a class by themselves. They are as smooth as the 
arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are 
as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by 
scenery as alluring as Scherezade. The spinal column 
of Vancouver's highway system is the splendid Island 
Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the 
east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus, 
Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and WeUington, to Nanoose 
Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up 
the coast to Campbell River, which is the northern- 
most point that can be reached by road, while the other 
fork swings inland, skirting the shores of Cameron 
Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay 
Sound, to Great Central Lake, which, as its name indi- 
cates, is in the very heart of the island, upward of a hun- 
dred and fifty miles from Victoria as the motor goes. 
The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known 
as the Malahat Drive, the road here chmbing over a 
mountain range of considerable height by means of 
a splendidly surfaced but none too wide shelf, with 
many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky 
face of the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until 

371 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the giant firs in the gloomy gorge below look no larger 
than hedge-plants, and the waters of the sound, with 
its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in 
a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you 
drive with caution. But it is no place for joy riding. 
It is too narrow, in the first place, and the turns are 
too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the 
bottom that they would have to gather up your re- 
mains with a shovel, which is messy and inconvenient. 

Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we 
were impressed with the universal politeness and good 
nature of the people we met, particularly in the back 
country, and by the courteous wording of the signs 
along the highways. The highway signs in the United 
States have a habit of shaking a fist in your face, meta- 
phorically speaking, and shouting at you: "Go any 
faster if you dare!" But in Vancouver they assume 
that you are a gentleman and address you as such. 
Instead of curtly ordering you to "Go slow" without 
condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign 
like this: "Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for 
the children," and, a little way beyond, another 
which says, "Thank you" — a little courtesy which 
costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush 
and leaves you permeated with a glow of good feeling. 

When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining 
centre of considerable importance, we found one of 
the periodic strikes which serve to relieve the tedium 
of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a 
militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets. 

372 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

When we speak of militia in the United States we 
usually think of slouch-hatted youths in rather slovenly 
uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday 
night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in 
an instruction camp each summer, and parade down 
the main streets of their respective towns on Decora- 
tion Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian 
militiamen were something quite different. I don't 
suppose that they are a whit more efficient when it 
comes to the business of slaughter than their cousins 
south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more 
picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you 
imagine several hundred young Americans dressed in 
plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an interim of bare 
knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky 
little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping 
the upper hand in a strike-ridden American city? 
I can't. These young men belonged, so I was told, to 
a "Highland" regiment, though after talking with a 
few of them I gathered that their acquaintance with 
the Highlands consisted in having occupied seats in 
the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder. 
But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they 
were running the show in Nanaimo and, from all indi- 
cations, running it very well. 

Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Van- 
couver Island, either from the view-point of an artist 
or a motorist, is that portion of the Island Highway 
between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and 
Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first 

373 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

traversed it in the golden radiance of an October day, 
I thought it was the most beautiful road I had ever 
seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of 
memory, with a knowledge of most of the other beau- 
tiful highways of the world to compare it with, I am 
still of the same opinion. So impressive is the scenery, 
so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and 
spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we 
were in the nave of a great cathedral. High above us 
the tree tops interlaced in a roof of translucent green 
through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the road 
into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the 
tree trunks into old-gold plush. The meadowed hill- 
sides were so thickly strewn with lacy ferns and wild 
flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect 
had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they 
use in ladies' boudoirs; and scattered about, as might 
be expected in a lady's boudoir, were silver mirrors — 
with rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were 
the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering 
over the shoulders of other peaks like soldiers en 
echelon. They ran the gamut of the more sober colours; 
green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then 
the dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of 
scrub and underbrush, the violet and blue and purple 
of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a crown of dazzling 
white. 

The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring 
folders that you find in racks in railway offices and 
hotel lobbies very cleverly play on the Anglo-Saxon 

374 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

love for sport by describing the region through which 
their particular system runs as "a sportsman's para- 
dise." It makes small difference whether they are 
describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the Berkshire 
hills, they are all "sportsman's paradises." But the 
northern half of Vancouver Island is all that this much- 
abused term implies and more. It is, I suppose, the 
finest and most accessible fish and game country on the 
continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware 
that I may be accused of belonging to the Ananias 
Club when I say that certain of the smaller streams in 
Vancouver Island (and also in northern British Colum- 
bia) are at certain seasons of the year so choked with 
salmon that they can be, and are, speared with a 
pitchfork, and that ruffed grouse and Chinese pheas- 
ants are so plentiful and tame that they can be knocked 
over with a long-handled shovel. It's true, just the 
same. We didn't pitchfork any salmon ourselves, 
because it isn't our conception of sport, but we saw 
natives tossing them out of a stream north of Alberni 
as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking 
hay. Nor did we assassinate any game-birds with a 
shovel; but more than once, during the run from 
Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve 
aside to avoid running down grouse, which were so 
tame that a Plymouth Rock would be wild in compari- 
son; and once, near Cameron Lake^ we actually did 
run over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese 
cock pheasant that insolently refused to get off the road. 
Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni, 
375 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

occupy the anomalous position of being in the middle 
of the island and at the same time on its western coast. 
If you will take the trouble to look at the map you 
will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound 
reaches into the very heart of the island, thus permit- 
ting deep-sea merchantmen to tie up at Port Alberni's 
wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and dried 
salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should 
have liked to linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is 
its Old- World atmosphere as it dozes the sunny days 
away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling with 
the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds 
it. Because it is so comparatively little visited, and 
because the waters of the sound are famous for their 
salmon runs, we expected that we would have an oppor- 
tunity to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met 
with disappointment, for the salmon with which these 
waters swarm were, for strictly domestic reasons, not 
biting at the time we were there. So we kept on to 
Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni, 
through the forest. 

Even though you do not know a trout from a 
turbot, a fly from a spoon; even though some of the 
finest scenery in the three Americas could not elicit 
an "Oh!" of admiration or an "Ah!" of pleasure, I 
hope that some day you will visit Great Central Lake, 
if for no other reason than to experience the novelty 
of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel. It is 
called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah's day, 
it is a floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of 

376 




The Ark, on Great Central Lake. "Like its prototype of Noah's day, it is a 
iloating caravansary." 




A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of Vancouver Island. 
SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND. 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

twenty bedrooms built on a raft anchored in the lake. 
When the fishing becomes indifferent in the neigh- 
bourhood, the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up 
the engines of his launch, and tows his floating hotel 
elsewhere. The fish have a hard time keeping away 
from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It is pat- 
ronised in the main by that world-wide brotherhood 
whose members believe that no place is too remote or 
too difficult of access if their journey is rewarded by 
the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce rod 
or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel. 
For that reason one is quite likely to run across some 
very interesting people at The Ark. While we were 
there a party of English notabilities arrived. There 
were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful 
daughter. Lady Marjorie What's-her-Name, and a 
cousin, the Honourable So-and-So, and the earl's mine 
manager, and one or two others. Now there isn't 
anything very remarkable about meeting British nobil- 
ity in the Colonies, for nowadays you find earls and 
marquises and dukes floating around everj^where. In 
fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations, 
you can't escape them. The remarkable thing about 
this particular party was that they had tramped over- 
land from the extreme northern end of the island, where 
some mining properties in which the earl was inter- 
ested are situated, through unmapped and almost un- 
known forests, sleeping in the open with no covering 
save the blankets they carried on their backs, and with 
the Lady Majorie for their cook. She was as slim and 

377 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

trim and pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with 
her curly hair creeping out from under her soft hat, her 
Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom figure, her 
smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings, 
she might have stepped out of one of those novels by 
the WiUiamsons. 

The chief factor in the colonisation of British Co- 
lumbia and in the development of its resources is the re- 
markable railway expansion which is now taking place. 
No region in the world has witnessed such extraor- 
dinary progress in railway construction during the past 
five years. Until the spring of 1914 the "C. P. R.," 
as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called through- 
out the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and 
passenger transportation in the province, being scarcely 
less autocratic in its attitude and methods than the 
Standard Oil Company before it was curbed by Federal 
legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of 
the Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of 
Fort George and the last spike driven, the "C. P. R." 
suddenly found its hitherto undisputed supremacy 
challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped 
system, which, owing to its more northerly route and 
easier gradients, is able to make considerably faster 
running time from ocean to ocean than its long- 
established rival. Moreover, another great transcon- 
tinental system, the Canadian Northern, is already in 
partial operation and is rapidly nearing completion, 
while the construction gangs have begun work on the 

378 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk 
Pacific, over whose rails the latter plans to reach tide- 
water at Vancouver, thus invading territory which the 
Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as peculiarly 
its own. In another year or so, therefore, British 
Columbia will not only have a more complete railway 
system than either Washington or Oregon, but it will 
be the terminus of three great transcontinental systems, 
each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water, 
under the same management and the same name. 

If you will glance at the map at the back of this 
volume you will see that the railway systems of British 
Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic Z. The lower 
right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse 
Pass, near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific 
crosses the Rockies; the lower left-hand corner may 
stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus of the 
Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the 
Pacific Great Eastern; the upper right-hand corner 
of the Z we will designate as Yellowhead (or Tete 
Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and 
the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the 
upper left-hand corner is the great terminal port which 
the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to order at Prince 
Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately rep- 
resents the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand 
Trunk Pacific, and the diagonal the Canadian Northern. 

The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the 
province at Kicking Horse Pass and, dropping south- 
ward in a series of sweeping curves, strikes the Eraser 

379 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver. 
From the main line numerous branches straggle south- 
ward to the American border, thus giving access to the 
rich country lying between the Kootenai and the Okan- 
agan. Entering British Columbia far to the north- 
ward, through the Tete Jaune Pass, where the moun- 
tains are much lower, the Canadian Northern lays its 
course southwestward in almost a straight line, cross- 
ing the Thompson just above its junction with the 
Eraser and thence paralleling the Canadian Pacific 
through the caiion of the Eraser, though on the oppo- 
site side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian 
Northern is, I might add, spending a large sum in the 
construction of railway shops and yards at Port Mann, 
a place which it is building to order amid the virgin 
forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The 
Grand Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tete Jaune Pass 
as a gateway. Instead of turning southward after 
crossing the mountains, however, it swings far to the 
north, following the east fork of the Eraser to Eort 
George and thence up the level and fertile valleys of 
the Nechako and the Bulkley to New Hazel ton and so 
down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising the 
necessity of having a means of direct access to Van- 
couver, which is the metropolis of western Canada, the 
Grand Trunk Pacific now has under construction a sub- 
sidiary system, to be known as the Pacific Great East- 
ern, which, leaving the main fine at Fort George, will 
follow the Eraser due southward to Lillooet and then 
strike directly across a virgin country to Vancouver, 

380 



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Indians breaking camp. 




Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country. 




An Indian bridge near New Hazelton. 
LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND. 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast 
terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific 
engineers have also drawn plans for a line running due 
north from New Hazelton toward the Yukon, which 
would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of 
the Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost 
British Columbia, the idea being, of course, to ulti- 
mately effect a junction with the proposed Federal rail- 
way in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway 
communication with the outside world. 

Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Van- 
couver Island has not yet had its share of railway ex- 
pansion, its only system of transportation at present 
being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs 
from Victoria to Alberni, in the heart of the island. 
The Canadian Northern, however, proposes to build 
a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the 
island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival 
one better, has obtained a concession for building a 
railway from one end of the island to the other, thus 
opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and 
forests. With this era of railway expansion immedi- 
ately before them, it seems to me that the British Co- 
lumbians are quite justified in looking at the future 
through rose-coloured glasses. 

Consider the cities, how they grow — Prince Ru- 
pert, for example. A city hterally made to order, just 
as a tailor would make a suit of clothes, is something 
of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent 
and slaps tradition in the face. "Rome was not built 

381 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

in a day," but that was because it had no transconti- 
nental railway system to finance and superintend and 
push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine, 
& Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its 
directors knew their business, they would have turned 
loose their engineers, architects, and builders and, after 
staking out and draining a town site beside the Tiberian 
marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and 
auctioned off the building lots along the Via Appia as 
expeditiously as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has 
brought into being the west-coast terminus which it 
has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Pala- 
tine prince, nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a 
cavalry leader, a naval commander, and the first 
governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your 
family atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regret- 
fully observed that most of them were purchased at 
about the period of Stanley's explorations) you will 
search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom- 
made municipality came into existence about the same 
time as the tango and the turkey-trot. The easiest 
way to locate it, then, is to trace with your finger 
parallel 54° 40' North (the slogan "Fifty-four forty or 
fight!" you will recall, once nearly brought on a war 
with England) until it reaches the Pacific Coast of 
North America. There, five hundred and fifty miles 
north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan 
border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena 
River, set on a range of hills overlooking one of the 
finest deep-water harbours in the world, is Prince 

382 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and has 
a wet and foggy dimate which cannot fail to make a 
Londoner feel very much at home. Probably never be- 
fore have there been so much time and money expended 
in the planning and preliminary work of a new city. 
The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection 
of the entire British Columbia coast-line and was laid 
out by a famous firm of Boston landscape engineers 
with the same attention to detail which they would have 
given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have 
studied the plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert 
that in time it will be one of the most beautiful cities 
on the continent. The site is a picturesque one, for, 
from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around 
the front of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that 
on clear days — ^which, by the way, are far from common 
— a magnificent view may be had from the heights of 
the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island- 
studded channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, 
known as the "Holy City," and, on rare occasions, of 
the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is conversant 
with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one 
has seen its seaports — ^Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, 
Tacoma, San Pedro, San Diego — spring into being 
almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the possi- 
bilities and potentialities of this new city with the 
unfamiliar name. To begin with, the distance from 
Liverpool to Yokohama by way of Prince Rupert is 
eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and 
San Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the 

383 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Orient than any other Pacific port. Nothing illus- 
trates more graphically the strategic value of its posi- 
tion than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New 
York from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train 
at Prince Rupert and be as far as Winnipeg, or vir- 
tually half across the continent, before the steamer 
from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. 
In addition to the shorter distance across the Pacific 
must be added the much faster time that can be made 
by rail over the practically level grades (four tenths 
of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has 
obtained through the lower mountains to the north, 
which will enable trains to be moved at the rate of two 
miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival 
systems. What is most important of all, however. 
Prince Rupert has at its back probably the potentially 
richest hinterland in the world — a veritable commercial 
empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. 
The mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest 
products, the gold, the coal, the copper, the iron ore 
of northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the food 
products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and fur 
of the far North — in short, all the westbound export 
wealth of this resourceful region — will find its outlet to 
the sea at Prince Rupert as surely and as true to natural 
laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific. 

You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank Presi- 
dent, you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you, 
Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in 
palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the 

384 



CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 

breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who 
are laying these railways, who are building these cities, 
who are making these new markets and new play- 
grounds for you and me? Some of them have saved 
and scrimped for years that they might be able to buy 
a ticket from the Middle West, or from the English 
shires, or from the Rhine banks to this beckoning, 
primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their fami- 
lies and their household belongings with them, have 
trekked overland by wagon, just as their grandfathers 
did before them for the taking of the West, trudging 
in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over 
camp-fires in the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, 
rolled in their blankets, under the stars. Some there 
are who have come overland from the Yukon, on snow- 
shoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on 
their back, living on the food which they killed, their 
only sign-posts the endless line of wire-draped poles. 
There are the engineers, who, mocking at the hostility 
of the countenance which this savage, untamed land 
turns toward them, are pushing forward and ever 
forward their twin lines of steel, cutting their way 
through well-nigh impenetrable "forests, throwing their 
spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, 
running their levels and laying their rails and driving 
their spikes oblivious to torrential rains or blinding 
snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold. Then, too, 
there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who 
have maintained law and order through the length and 
breadth of this great province — travelHng on duty 

38s 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

through its wildest parts, amid dangers and privations 
without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far 
Nor'west, at others making their hazardous way on 
horseback along the brink of precipices which make 
one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming rapid rivers 
holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over 
the frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the 
mining camps on the uppermost reaches of the Eraser 
and the next carrying the fear of the law to the wild 
tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in 
Britain's westernmost outpost, are clinching down the 
rivets of empire. 



386 



XIV 
BACK OF BEYOND 



"I hear the tread of pioneers, 

Of millions yet to be; 
The first low wash of waves where soon 

Shall roll a human sea. 
The elements of empire here 

Are plastic yet and warm, 
The chaos of a mighty world 

Is rounding into form." 



XIV 
BACK OF BEYOND 

MOST people — and by that I mean nine hundred 
and ninety-eight in every thousand — have come 
to beheve quite positively that, on this continent at 
least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully 
be called "The Frontier." Therein they are wrong. 
Because the municipality of Tombstone has applied 
to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change its 
name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the 
range for the more lucrative occupation of cavorting 
before a moving-picture camera, because the roulette 
ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western 
town is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a 
matter of fact, it has only been pushed back. There 
still exists a real frontier, all wool and eight hundred 
miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants 
of cowboys. Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schoon- 
ers, pack-trains, trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. 
But it won't last much longer. This is the last call. 
If you would see this stage of nation building in all its 
thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need 
to hurry. A few more years — half a dozen at the most 
— and store clothes will replace the chaparejos and som- 
breros; the mail-sacks, instead of being carried in the 

389 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of 
flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie- 
schooner and the pack-train. 

Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of 
time, money, and exertion, you could visit a region as 
untamed and colourful as was the country beyond the 
Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest 
breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns 
of civilisation, would you give up for a time the com- 
forts of the sheltered life and go? You would? I 
hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place 
of exile and open it to the map of North America 
that I may show you the way. In the upper left-hand 
corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven degrees 
of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central 
and northern portions contain thousands upon thou- 
sands of square miles that have never felt the pressure 
of a white man's foot or echoed to a white man's voice. 
Here is the last of the "Last West"; here the frontier 
is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles 
and solving the problems of civilisation, are to be 
found the survivors of that race of rugged adventurers, 
now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the 
wheat-field — the Pioneers. 

There are several routes by which one can reach 
the interior of the province: from the made- to-order 
seaport of Prince Rupert up the Skeena by railway to 
New Hazel ton and Fort Eraser, for example; or down 
the South Fork of the Eraser by river steamer from 
Tete Jaune Cache to Fort George; or from the country 

390 



BACK OF BEYOND 

of the Kootenai overland through the Okanogan and 
Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side entrances 
and more or less difficult of access. The front door to 
the hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by 
way of Ashcroft, a one-street-two-hotels-and-eight- 
saloons town on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, 
eight hours east of Vancouver as the Imperial Limited 
goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting 
point for all this region, begins the historic highway 
known as the Cariboo Trail, by which you can travel 
northward — provided you are able to get a seat in the 
crowded stages — until civilisation sits down to rest 
and the wilderness begins. 

What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its compre- 
hensive system of mail, passenger, and freight services, 
was to our own West in the days before the railway 
came, the British Columbia Express Company, com- 
monly known as the "B. C. X.," is to that vast region 
which is watered by the Eraser. Nowhere that I can 
recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous 
country been reduced to such a science. Although the 
company operates upward of a. thousand miles of stage 
lines, along which are distributed more than three 
hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen 
miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential 
rains, and ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, main- 
tain their schedules with the rigidity of mail-trains. 
The company's equipment is as complete in its way as 
that of a great railway system, its rolling stock con- 
sisting of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace 

391 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"jerky" to a six-horse Concord stage, to say nothing 
of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction with its 
system of vehicular transportation it operates a ser- 
vice of river steamers, specially constructed for run- 
ning the rapids, upon the Upper Eraser and the 
Nechako. 

The backbone of the "B. C. X." system, and, 
indeed, of all transportation in the British Columbian 
hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government post- 
road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the 
Royal Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the 
rush to the gold-fields on Williams Creek. Starting 
from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two hundred and 
twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Eraser, where 
it abruptly turns westward and continues to its termi- 
nus at Barkerville, once a famous mining-camp but now 
a quiet agricultural community in the heart of the 
Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of 
fifteen miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer 
can obtain surprisingly well-cooked meals at a uniform 
charge of six bits — a "bit," I might explain for the 
benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to 
twelve and a half cents. For the same price the 
traveller can get a clean and moderately soft bed, 
although he must accept it as part and parcel of fron- 
tier life should he find that the room to which he is 
assigned already contains half a dozen snoring occu- 
pants. These rest-houses, which, with their out- 
buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely of 
logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and 

392 



BACK OF BEYOND 

occasionally surrounded by stockades and constantly 
reminded me of the post stations which marked the 
end of a day's journey on the Great Siberian Road 
before Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. 
During the summer months the "up journey" of three 
hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort 
George is performed by a conjoined service of motor- 
cars, stage-coaches, and river boats, and, if the roads 
are dry, is made in about four days. As a one-way 
ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the 
fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, 
thus making it one of the most expensive journeys of 
its length in the world, being even costlier, if I remem- 
ber rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian railway from 
Djibuti to Dere Dawa. It is worth every last penny of 
the fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a 
picturesqueness, an excitement, which cannot be du- 
phcated on this continent. From the moment that 
you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ash- 
croft until your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert 
Harbour, southward bound, you are seeing with your 
own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums 
of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, 
a nation in the cellar-digging stage of its existence; 
you are transported for a brief time to the Epoch of 
the Dawn. 

In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we 
expected to encounter, I had had the car fitted with 
shock-absorbers and had brought with me from Van- 
couver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft 

393 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

we selected an equipment with as great care as though 
we were starting on an East African safari. A pick, a 
long-handled shovel, a pair of axes, a block and tackle, 
four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised the 
essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel 
a supply of tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of 
rubber sheets, and three of the largest-size Hudson 
Bay blankets. It's a costly business, this motoring 
in lands where motors have never gone before. The 
most important thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, 
the entire success of our venture depending upon our 
ability to carry a sufficient supply with us to get us 
through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilder- 
ness between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing 
our personal belongings to a minimum, we succeeded 
in getting eight five-gallon tins into the tonneau of the 
car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus 
giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically 
at least, should have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, 
it did not suffice to carry us half-way to the Skeena, so 
slow was the going and so terrible the condition of the 
road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an 
order from a British development company on its agents 
at several points in the interior, instructing them to sup- 
ply us with gasoline from some drums which had been 
taken in at enormous expense a year or so before in a 
futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we 
should have been compelled to abandon the car in the 
wilderness for lack of fuel. Gasoline, like everything 
else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft I paid 

394 



BACK OF BEYOND 

fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, 
until we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two 
dollars a gallon — ^which, so I was assured, was exactly 
what it had cost the company to freight it in. Briefly, 
our plan was this : to start from Ashcrof t, a station on 
the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, 
and follow the Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, 
thence striking through the unsettled and almost un- 
explored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to 
the Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail 
through Fort Fraser to New Hazleton, on the Skeena, 
which is barely half a hundred miles south of the 
Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft 
as to our chances of getting through, and the more 
people to whom I talked the slimmer they seemed to 
become. 

One man assured us that there was no road what- 
ever north of Fort Fraser and that, if we wanted to 
get through, we would have to take the car apart and 
pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile 
agent from Seattle had done the year before; another 
told us that there were no bridges and that we would 
be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make rafts to 
ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us 
up by assuring us that we could always get a team to 
haul us out. 

"An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in 
a fortnight," he remarked cheeringly. 

"What would it cost?" I inquired. 

"Oh," he answered, "if you're a good hand at 
395 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

bargaining you ought to get the outfit for about a 
hundred dollars a day." 

That cheered us up tremendously, of course. 

We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn 
morning. The air was like sparkling Moselle, over- 
head was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the 
gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, be- 
tween dun and barren hills, into the unknown. The 
entire population of the little town had turned out to 
see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low 
bonnet of the car pointed northward, they gave us a 
cheer and shouted after us, "Hope you'll get through, 
feUows!" and "Good luck!" Before we left Seattle 
I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we 
flew from a metal rod at the front of the hood, and 
more than once, when we were mired in the mud below 
the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready to 
quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting 
fluttering bravely before us which spurred us on. 

Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern 
States it would be described by the natives as "a fair 
to middhn' road," and it is all of that and more — in the 
dry season. When we traversed it, in the early fall, it 
had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn 
rains and heavy teaming and was as good a road as an 
automobile pioneer could ask for. In that journey up 
the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour 
and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border 
Hfe which most people think of as having passed with 
the pony express and the buffalo. A stage-coach rat- 

396 



BACK OF BEYOND 

tied past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet body 
lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four 
horses at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip- 
lash spasmodically between the ears of his leaders, for 
he carried his Majesty's mails and must make his six 
miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic 
boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the 
burdened mules plodding by dejectedly, long ears to 
shaven tails. Scattered along the line, like mounted 
officers beside a marching column, were the packers: 
wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the 
colour of their saddles; picturesque figures in their 
goatskin chaparejos, their vivid neckerchiefs, and their 
broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound 
for. Heaven only knows : with supplies for the operators 
of the Yukon Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the 
Groundhog, or, it might be, for the lonely trading- 
posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the 
Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train's dusty wake 
would plod a solitary prospector, dog dirty, his buck- 
skin shirt glazed with grime, his tent, pick, shovel, and 
his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient 
donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and 
Siwash ranchers — for the Indian of British Columbia 
takes more kindly to an agricultural life than do his 
brothers on the American side of the border — ^gaily 
clad squaws and bright-eyed children peering curi- 
ously at our strange vehicle from beneath the canvas 
covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to 
barter the produce of their holdings in the back coun- 

397 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

try for cartridges, red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a 
phonograph. 

But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their 
six and eight and twelve horse teams straining at the 
huge, creaking, white-topped wagons — the freight 
trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear 
a marked resemblance to the prairie-schooners of 
crossing-the-plains days, the British Columbian freight 
wagons are barely half as large as the enormous scow- 
bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked 
westward. Their inferior carrying capacity is com- 
pensated for, however, by the custom of linking them 
in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt to 
negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with 
vehicles having an unusually long wheel-base is but 
to invite disaster. In freighting parlance, five wagons 
with their teams are called a "swing," the drivers are 
known as "skinners," and the man in charge of the 
outfit is the "swing boss." To meet one of these 
wagon-trains on a road that was uncomfortably narrow 
at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff 
was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the 
freighter is always permitted to take the inside of the 
road, so that more than once we were compelled to 
pull so far to the outside, in order to give the huge 
vehicles space to get by, that there was not room be- 
tween our outer wheels and the precipice's brink for 
a starved greyhound to pass. 

The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more 
infrequent become the mails, until, north of the Eraser, 

398 



BACK OF BEYOND 

the settlers receive their letters and newspapers only 
once a month during the summer and frequently not 
for many months on end when the rains have turned 
the trails into impassable morasses. When we left 
Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two 
weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible 
condition that the driver of the mail-stage would not 
even hazard a guess as to when he could start. At 
frequent intervals along the way men were camping 
in the rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no pro- 
tection save the scant shelter afforded by a dog- tent 
or a bit of canvas stretched between two trees. At the 
sound of our approach they would run out and hail 
us and inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell 
them when the mail was likely to be along. These men 
were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the wilder- 
ness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that 
road for many days, straining their ears to catch the 
rattle of the wheels which would bring them word from 
the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut, 
clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping be- 
side the road in a Httle shelter tent, told us that he had 
been there for fifteen days waiting for the postman. 

"I've got a little ranch about thirty miles back," 
he explained, "and I was so afraid that I might miss 
the mail that I tramped out and have been sleeping 
here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the 
kiddies are back in the old country, in Devonshire, 
waiting until I can get a home for them out here. I 
haven't had a letter from them now for going on seven 

399 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little 
girl was sick, and I'm pretty anxious about her. It's 
bad news that the coach hasn't started yet. I guess 
the only thing to do is to keep on waiting." 

To such men as these I lift my hat in respect 
and admiration. Resolute, patient, persevering, facing 
with stout hearts and smiling lips all the hardships 
and discouragements that such a life has to bring, 
they are the real advance-guards of progress, the 
skirmishers of civilisation. In Rhodesia, the Sudan, 
West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find 
them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping 
down the rivets of empire. 

A great deal has been written about the brand of 
Englishman who goes by the name of remittance-man. 
With a few pounds a month to go to the devil on, he 
haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, 
working when he must, idling when he may. In Cape 
Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne, 
Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished 
bars, or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. 
As his long-suffering relatives generally send him as 
far from home as they can buy a ticket, he has become 
a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Domin- 
ion and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed 
in well-cut tweeds or flannels and smoking the inevi- 
table brier, you can see- him at almost any hour of any 
day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the 
Empress Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the 
Union Club. But you rarely find him in the British 

400 




A meeting of the old and the new. 




"The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.' 




'The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded by stockades.' 
SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL. 



BACK OF BEYOND 

Columbian bush. The atmosphere — and by this I 
do not mean the climate — is uncongenial, for "he 
ain't a worker" and in consequence is cordially detested 
by the native-bom no less than by those industrious 
settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly 
cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out 
to his labour in the morning he is counted an unde- 
sirable addition to the population. Hence, though the 
hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack, com- 
paratively few of them bear the despised label of 
remittance-man. 

But that is not saying that you do not find num- 
bers of well-bred, well-educated young Englishmen 
chopping out careers for themselves up there in the 
forests of the North. We came across two such at a 
desolate and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel 
and Blackwater, three hundred miles from the nearest 
railway and thirty from the nearest house. We stopped 
at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they wel- 
comed us as they would a certified cheque. One of 
them, I learned after considerable questioning, was the 
nephew of an earl and had stroked an Oxford crew; 
the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed 
me the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house 
in Hampshire which he called home, and remarked 
quite casually that he had been something of a cricketer 
before he came out to the Colonies and had played for 
the Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two 
youngsters, gently born and cleanly bred, "pigging 
it," as they themselves expressed it, in a one-room 

401 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens ! 
how glad they were to see us — not for our own sakes, 
you understand, but because we were messengers from 
that great, gay world from which they had exiled 
themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, 
the other fried the bacon — "sow-belly" they called 
it — in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of them fired 
questions at us like shots from an automatic: what 
were the newest plays, the latest songs, how long 
since I had been in London, was the chorus at the 
Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston 
Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he 
just a bally ass, did we think that there was anything 
to this talk about the Ulstermen revolting — and all the 
other questions that homesick exiles ask. 

"What on earth induces you to stay on in this 
God-forsaken place?" I asked, when at length they 
paused in their questioning for lack of breath. "No 
neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a 
month if you are lucky, rain six months out of the 
twelve, and snow for four months more. Why don't you 
try some place nearer civilisation ? You can't do much 
more than make a bare Hving up here, and a pretty 
poor one at that, eh?" 

"Well," said one of them apologetically, "we do 
a lot better up here than you'd think. Why, last sea- 
son we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year, now 
that we've cleared some more land, we'll probably get 
a hundred and fifty." 

"A hundred tons of hay!" I exclaimed, with pity 
402 



BACK OF BEYOND 

in my voice. "Heavens alive, man, what does that 
amount to?" 

"It amounted to something over ten thousand 
dollars," he answered. "Up here, you see, hay is a 
pretty profitable crop — it sells for a hundred dollars a 
ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It's a bit 
lonely, of course, but we're fond of the open and there's 
all sort of fishin' and shootin' — there's a skin of a 
grizzly that I killed last week tacked up at the back of 
the house. And," he added, with a hint of embarrass- 
ment, "this life is a lot more worth while than loafin' 
around London and doin' the society- Johnnie act. We 
feel, y' know, as though we were doin' a bit toward 
buildin' up the country — sort of bally pioneers." 

Though they probably didn't know it, those two 
young fellows in flannel shirts and cord breeches, who 
had evidently left England because they were tired of 
living a la metronome, because they had wearied of 
garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, 
were members in good standing of the Brotherhood 
of Nation Builders. 

Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty 
gallons of gasoline, the going had been so heavy that 
by the time we reached the telegraph hut at Bobtail 
Lake, where the development company of which I 
have already spoken had left the first of its drums of 
gasoline, our supply was seriously diminished. These 
relay telegraph stations are scattered at intervals of 
fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire, 
two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City 

403 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

with Vancouver. Many of them are so remotely situ- 
ated that the only time the operators see a white man's 
face or hear a white man's voice is when the semi- 
annual pack-train brings them their supplies in the 
spring and fall. I can conceive of no more intolerable 
existence than the lives led by these men, sitting at 
deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their 
log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, noth- 
ing under the sun to do save Hsten to the ceaseless 
chatter of a telegraph instrument, day after day, week 
after week, month after month the same. Imagine 
the monotony of it ! There were two young men at 
the Bobtail Lake hut, an operator and a Hnesman, 
and when they saw the little flag of stripes and stars 
fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their 
hats and cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered 
lives in offices or factories or stores, the flag may be 
nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue bunting, 
but to those who live in the earth's far corners, where 
it is rarely seen, it stands for home and country and 
family and friends, and is reverenced accordingly. 

"It seems darned good to see the old flag again," 
one of the young men remarked a trifle huskily. "This 
is the first time I've laid eyes on it in more'n two years. 
When we heard you coming through the woods we 
thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to 
see an automobile up in this God-forsaken hole." 

"You're not a Canadian, then?" I asked. 

"Not on your tintype. I'm from Tennessee. 
Used to be a train-despatcher down in Texas, got tired 

404 



BACK OF BEYOND 

of living in a box car with no trees but sage-brush and 
no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. 
And believe me, I wish I was back in God's country 
again." 

That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. 
The English owner and his wife were absent in Van- 
couver, but the ranch hand in charge of the place was 
only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch- 
house, though built of logs, for up there there is nothing 
else to build with, was considerably more pretentious 
than the general run of frontier dwellings. Instead of 
the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room, it 
had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone 
fireplace and the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, 
and two sleeping rooms, while in front, in pathetic 
imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny 
plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums 
and surrounded by an attempt at a picket fence. The 
floor of the house was of planks hand-hewn; cedar 
poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod 
formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks 
in the log walls were stuffed with moss and clay and 
papered over with illustrations torn from the London 
weekhes. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in 
the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and 
obviously home-made, with benches instead of chairs, 
for the freighters, who charge thirty cents a pound for 
hauling merchandise in from the railway, refuse to 
bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which 
require space out of all proportion to their weight. 

405 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

Lying on the table in the hving-room, atop of a heap 
of year-old newspapers and magazines (for in the north 
country printed matter of any description is some- 
thing to be read and reread and then read once again 
before it is passed on to a neighbour) were two much- 
thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was curious 
to see what sort of literature would appeal to people 
who lived their Hves in such a place. One was the 
"Discourses of Epictetus," the other "Manners and 
Social Usages" — with a book-mark at the chapter en- 
titled "The Etiquette of Visiting Cards"! And the 
nearest neighbour, a Swedish rancher with a Siwash 
wife, lived fifty miles away. 

If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the 
house, or only half as good, there would have been 
little left to be desired. The ranch hand who was in 
charge of the place and who did the cooking — ^he vouch- 
safed the information that he had been a British soldier 
in India before coming to Canada to seek his fortune 
and wished to God that he was back in India again — 
made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough soda- 
biscuits the first of every month to last until the next 
month came round. As we were there about the 
twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite hard — like dog- 
biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter 
of "sow-belly" swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; 
stone-cold boiled potatoes, a pan of the inevitable 
stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking coffee, which 
was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? 
This was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier. 

406 



BACK OF BEYOND 

I was particularly impressed throughout our jour- 
ney across British Columbia with the almost paternal 
interest the provincial government takes in the welfare 
of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere 
are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to every- 
thing from the filing of homestead claims to the pre- 
vention of forest-fires. Rest-houses are maintained 
by the government along certain of the less-travelled 
routes; new roads are being cut through the wilder- 
ness in every direction; forest-rangers and agricultural 
experts are constantly riding about the province with 
open eyes and ears; in every settlement is stationed a 
government agent from whom the settlers can obtain 
information and advice on every subject under the sun. 
Law and order prevail to an extraordinary degree. I 
was told that there are only three police constables 
between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of more 
than three hundred miles — and this in a savage and 
sparsely settled country, where a criminal would have 
comparatively little difficulty in making his escape. 
This remarkable absence of crime is due in large mea- 
sure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of 
alcoholic liquor within a certain distance of a public 
work, such as the building of a railway; in fact, the 
workman is debarred from intoxicants as rigorously 
as the Indian. "No drink, no crime," say the authori- 
ties, and results have shown that they know what they 
are talking about. Not until the railway is completed 
and the construction gangs have moved on are the 
saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Al- 

.407 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

though this policy unquestionably makes for law and 
order, it is by no means popular with the workmen, 
who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name 
of town until it has obtained a licence. "Such and 
such a place is a hell of a fine town," I was frequently 
assured. "They've got a saloon there!" Judged by 
this standard. Fort George, which is a division point 
on the Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the 
Eraser and Nechako Rivers, and will unquestionably 
become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is a 
veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than 
its share of gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has 
vividly described it in a single couplet: 

"The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, 
Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare." 

It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a 
Mecca for the dry of throat, who make bacchanalian 
pilgrimages from incredible distances to its bottle- 
decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to "go on 
a jag" no power on earth, not even a journey of a hun- 
dred miles or more, can prevent him from gratifying 
his desires. Indeed, it is by no means unusual for a 
man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has 
accumulated a half year's wages, and then, throwing 
up his job, to tramp a hundred miles through the 
wilderness to Fort George and blow every last cent of 
his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What 
a sudden falling off in intemperance there would be in 
a civilised community if a man had to walk a hundred 

408 



BACK OF BEYOND 

miles to get a drink ! What ? Yet this proscription of 
alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the 
men, being denied what might be described as legal 
liquors, resort to innumerable more or less efficient 
substitutes. Red ink they will swallow with avidity, 
for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, 
and the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. An- 
other popular refreshment is lemon extract, such as is 
commonly used in civilised households for flavouring 
jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, 
which is to all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage 
champagne is to all other wines, is a certain patent 
medicine which contains eighty per cent of pure alcohol. 
This is as common in the " end-of-steel " towns and the 
construction camps as cocktails are in a New York 
club, both workmen and Indians pouring it down like 
water. It is warranted to cure all pains, and it does, 
for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the 
world for at least a day. 

As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones. 
Fort George might truthfully be described as a very 
lively town. In one of its saloons twelve white-aproned 
individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of 
polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful 
man with a cocked revolver on his knees; while min- 
gling with the crowd in front of the bar are three bull- 
necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the "chuckers- 
out." Instead of throwing a patron who becomes 
obstreperous into the street, however, in which case he 

would stagger to the saloon opposite and get rid of the 

409 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

balance of his money, he is thrown into the "cooler," 
where he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects 
of his debauch, after which he is ready to start in all 
over again. As a result of this ingenious system of 
conservation, very little money gets away. 

These frontier communities have handled the per- 
plexing problem of the social evil in a novel manner. 
The bedecked and bedizened women who follow in the 
wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs, 
instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within 
the town, are forced to reside in colonies of their own 
well without the municipal limits, sometimes half a 
dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who wishes 
to see his light-o'-love is compelled, therefore, to ex- 
pend a considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, 
though I regret to add that this did not appear to act 
as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn trails that I 
saw in the Northland being those which led from the 
settlements to these colonies of easy virtue. 

Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began 
to rain — not a sudden shower which comes and drenches 
and goes, but one of those steady, disheartening driz- 
zles, which in this region sometimes last for a week. 
The road — I call it a road merely for the sake of polite- 
ness — ^which had been atrocious from the moment we 
left the Eraser, quickly became worse. It was composed 
of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries, 
saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very 
sticky and very slippery material peculiar to British 
Columbia, known as "muskeg." Though it looks sub- 

410 



BACK OF BEYOND 

stantial enough, with its top growth of stubble and 
moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of 
Virginia red clay, Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and 
New Orleans molasses. To make matters worse, a 
drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded 
us, so that the road, which was inconceivably bad under 
any circumstances, had been trampled into a black 
morass which no vehicle could by any possibility get 
through. There was only one thing for us to do and 
that was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst 
stretches of it. I have heard veterans of the Civil 
War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying roads for 
the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chicka- 
hominy, but I didn't appreciate the truth of their 
remarks until I tried it myself. While camping in 
various parts of the world I had used an axe in a dilet- 
tante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping 
fire-wood, but there is a vast deal of difference between 
that sort of thing and cutting down enough trees to 
pave a road. In an hour our hands were so blistered 
that every movement of the axe helve brought excru- 
ciating pain; but it was a question of corduroying that 
road or else abandoning the car and making our way 
to civiHsation afoot through several hundred miles of 
forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assis- 
tance. At noon we paused long enough to light a fire 
and cook a meal of sorts, which we ate seated on logs 
amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting down and 
swarms of voracious black fhes and mosquitoes hovering 
about us. Five hours more of tree felling and we 

411 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

decided that our corduroy causeway was sufficiently 
solid to get over it with the car. As a matter of fact, 
we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that 
stage of exhaustion and desperation where we didn't 
care what happened. If the car stuck in the mud, well 
and good. She could stay there and take root and 
sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Back- 
ing up so as to get a running start, our driver opened 
wide his throttle and the car tore at the stretch of 
home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck. 
Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man's 
body were hurled a dozen feet away. The snapping of 
the limbs and the deafening explosions of the engines 
sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled 
and swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every in- 
stant I expected it to capsize; but our driver, clinging 
desperately to the wheel, contrived, with a skill in 
driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it 
from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to 
tell it, we had traversed the morass we had spent an 
entire day in corduroying, and the car, trembling like 
a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground. 
The road over which we had passed looked as though 
it had been struck by a combined hurricane, cyclone, 
and tornado. 

It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned 
by a Swede named Peter Rasmussen. What the man 
at Blackwater had described as "a swell place" con- 
sisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set 
down in the middle of a forest clearing. No smoke 

412 



BACK OF BEYOND 

issued from the chimney, no dog barked a welcome, 
there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a 
few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that 
no one was at home. Presently, however, we saw a 
fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon his shoulder, 
emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us 
across the pasture. I hailed him. 

"Are you Mr. Rasmussen?" 

"Ay ban reckon ay am." 

"And can you put us up for the night?" I queried 
anxiously. 

"Ay ban reckon ay can." 

A stone's throw from the one-roomed log cabin in 
which Rasmussen and his single ranch-hand, a stolid 
and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked and ate 
and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by 
the light of a guttering candle was the bunk house. 
A bunk house, I might explain, is a building peculiar 
to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room 
with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built 
against the wall. Here travellers may find a roof to 
shelter them and some hay on which to spread their 
blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his 
bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted 
us when Rasmussen threw open the heavy door, this 
particular bunk house had evidently not been occupied 
for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, 
we found that the bunks were very much occupied 
indeed. But after Pete had started a roaring fire in 
the little sheet-iron stove and when we had spread 

413 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

our " five-point " Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents- 
a-pound hay which served in Heu of mattresses and 
had scrubbed off some of the mud with which we were 
veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry ones, 
the complexion of things began to change from brunette 
to blonde. Between the intervals of corduroying the 
road in the morning, I had shot with my revolver half 
a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our way. 
They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we 
handed them over to Pete to pluck and cook for sup- 
per, which was still further eked out by a mess of lake 
trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region 
one may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the 
every-day necessities, such as salt and butter and bread, 
but he can surfeit himself on such luxuries as venison 
and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, 
like so many other settlers in British Columbia, had 
come from the American Northwest, lured by the 
glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial govern- 
ment. But he, like so many others, had found that 
the appalling cost of living had made it impossible, 
even with hay at a hundred dollars a ton, for him to 
clear as much as he had in the United States. "So ay 
ban tank ay go back an' buy a farm in Minnesota," he 
concluded, knocking the ashes from his pipe. And 
that's precisely what a great many other discouraged 
Americans in western Canada are going to do. 

For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen's 
the road was rough, boggy, and exceedingly trying to 
the disposition, but it gradually improved until by the 

414 



BACK OF BEYOND 

time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves 
running along a short stretch of road of which a New 
England board of supervisors need not have felt too 
much ashamed. The terrible condition of the roads 
throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely 
due to the fact that they run for great distances through 
dense forests where the sun cannot penetrate to dry 
them up; this, taken with the abnormally heavy rains, 
serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. 
At Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of 
some twoscore log cabins clustered about a mission 
church whose gaudy paint and bulging dome spoke 
of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the 
Russians. The interior tribes are known as "stick 
Indians," referring, of course, to the fact that they 
dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to those living 
along the coast, who are known as "salt-chuck In- 
dians." Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroi- 
dered moccasins sat sewing and gossiping before their 
cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their skins white 
or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world 
over; bright-eyed, half -naked youngsters gambolled 
like frisky puppies in the street; bearskins were 
stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear of every 
house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the 
Siwashes' staple article of food. Though only one of 
the braves, who had been out into civilisation, had 
ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them seemed 
to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely 
enough, they became as shy as deer at sight of my 

415 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

camera, one picturesque old squaw refusing consecu- 
tive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and a dollar 
to come out from behind the door where she was hid- 
ing and let us take her picture. The old lady's daughter 
was willing enough to take a chance, however, for she 
offered to pose for as many pictures as we desired if 
we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which 
I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone- 
strewn street of the village at a rattling clip, and she 
not only never turned a hair but asked me to go faster. 
Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would make 
a real road burner. 

It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to 
Fort Eraser and the road proved a surprisingly good 
one. You must bear in mind, however, that when I 
speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, 
I am speaking comparatively. The best road we en- 
countered would, if it existed in the United States, 
drive a board of highway commissioners out of office, 
while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised com- 
munity wouldn't be considered a road at all — it would 
be used for a hog-wallow or for duck shooting. The 
mushroom settlement of Fort Eraser takes its name 
from the old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles 
from the town on the shores of Eraser Lake. When we 
were there the town consisted of half a hundred log 
and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five 
general stores, the branch of a Montreal bank, and the 
only hotel in the four hundred miles between Quesnel 
and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we 

416 



BACK OF BEYOND 

were there, and was of particular interest to us because 
it represented a phase of civihsation which in our own 
country has long since passed, but now that the rail- 
way is in operation its picturesque log cabins will 
doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses 
with green blinds, the boards laid along the edge of 
the road will give way to cement sidewalks, and it will 
have street lamps and a town hall and its name dis- 
played in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the 
station lawn and will look exactly like any one of a 
hundred other towns scattered along the transconti- 
nental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall 
pass through it again, this time from the observation 
platform of a Pullman, and I shall remark quite non- 
chalantly to my fellow travellers: "Oh, yes, I was up 
here in the good old days when this was nothing but a 
cluster of log huts at the Back of Beyond." 



417 



XV 
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 



' Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on, 

Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore, 
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon, 

Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar ? 
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking 
through it, 
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost ? 
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it; 
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost." 



XV 

THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

IT wasn't much of a chain as chains go — it really 
wasn't. After a good deal of poking about I had 
come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown care- 
lessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in 
Fort Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a 
chain of some sort, for our skid chains, as the result of 
the wear and tear to which they had been subjected on 
the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving 
out, and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what 
the settlers of northern British Columbia, with an 
appalling disregard for the truth, call roads unless you 
have taken all possible precautions against skidding. 
Up in that country of two-mile-high mountains, and 
mountain roads as slippery as the inside of a banana 
peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as likely as not 
to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile 
of emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose 
after a fashion, and as we could get nothing better, I 
told the smith to throw it in the car. After he had 
attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much 
I owed him. 

"Well," he answered, figuring with his pencil on 
a chip of wood, "the chain comes to sixteen dollars an' 

forty cents, an " 

421 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"Hold on !" I interrupted. "Please say that over 
again. It must be that I'm getting hard of hearing." 

"Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain," 
he repeated, unabashed. 

I leaned against the door of the log smithy for 
support. "Not for the chain ? " I gasped unbelievingly. 
"Not for twelve feet of rusty, second-hand, five-eighths- 
inch chain that I could get for half a dollar almost 
anywhere?" 

"Sure," said he. "An' I ain't makin' no profit 
on it at that. The freight charges for bringin' it in 
from the coast were eighteen cents a pound. But 
lookee here, friend, I don't want you to go away from 
Fort Eraser with the idee in your head that things 
up here is high-priced, 'cause they ain't. I wanta do 
the right thing by you. I'll tell you what I'll do — 
/'// knock 0^ the forty cents. ^^ 

Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no 
stretch of the imagination could Fort Eraser be called 
a poor man's town. Some of the prices which were 
asked — and which we paid — in the local store where 
we replenished our supply of provisions were as follows : 

Flour i6 cents per pound 

Sugar 25 cents per pound 

Tea and coffee $1.00 per pound 

Butter 75 cents per pound 

Oatmeal 30 cents per pound 

Dried fruits 25 cents per pound 

Tinned fruits 75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin 

Bacon 50 cents per pound 

422 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

Eggs (when procurable) $1.50 per dozen 

(In winter they sell for 50 cents each.) 

Potted meats 50 cents to $1.00 per tin 

Bread 25 cents per i-pound loaf 

(Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.) 

Potatoes $3.00 per bushel 

Chickens $4.00 each 

It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to 
which I soon became accustomed though not recon- 
ciled. It is only fair to say, however, that this was 
before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort 
Eraser is a station on a transcontinental system, the 
cost of living has doubtless been materially reduced, 
though I have no doubt that the scale of prices just 
quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to 
come in the settlements to the north of the Skeena. 

The population of Fort Eraser turned out en masse 
to see us off, the mothers — there were only eight white 
women in the town when we were there — bringing 
their children to the cabin doors to see their first motor- 
car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations 
suffered by these women who dwell along "the edge of 
things": no soda-water fountains, no afternoon teas, 
no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows, and the 
fashion papers usually six months late? It must be 
terrible. 

We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, 
I remember, for we had slept in beds instead of vermin- 
infested bunks or in blankets beside the road, we had 
breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of the 
customary chicory, "sow-belly," and prunes, and a 

423 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

feeble sun was doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked 
roads. Three miles out of Fort Eraser the swollen 
Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once 
more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three- 
ton motor-cars, or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and 
when it felt the sudden weight of the big machine upon 
its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a moment it 
looked as though the car would end its journey at 
the bottom of the river. Barring numerous short 
stretches where the treacherous black mud was up to 
our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy, two 
torrential showers, any number of stumps which 
threatened to rip off our pan and had to be levelled 
before we could pass, two punctures, a blowout, and a 
broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Ne- 
chako to Burns Lake was uneventful. 

Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged 
down the precipitous flank of a forest-clothed mountain, 
and the beams from our head lamps illumined the 
cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the 
settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settle- 
ment boasted at the time we were there the popu- 
lation of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding the 
fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was 
nothing more than a railway-construction camp, with 
its usual concomitants of hash houses, bunk houses, 
and gambling dens. With the completion of the rail- 
way it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it 
arose. Upon inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were 
taken up a creaking ladder into a loft above an eating- 

424 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

house, where fully two-score labourers from the south 
of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of 
filthy straw, snoring or scratching or tossing, in an 
atmosphere so dense with the mingled odours of garlic, 
fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that it could 
have been removed with a shovel. While we were 
debating as to whether we should look for less impossi- 
ble quarters or wrap up in our blankets and spend the 
night in the car, an American, who, from his air of au- 
thority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us: 

"There's no place here that's fit to sleep in," he 
said, "but I understand that one of the contracting 
company's barges is leaving for Decker Lake at mid- 
night. She's empty, so they'd probably be willing to 
carry you and your car. You'd have to sleep in the 
car, of course, and it's pretty cold on the water at this 
time of the year, but, believe me, it'll be a heap more 
comfortable than spending the night in one of these 
bunk houses. There's no road around the lake anyway, 
so you'll have to go by water if you go at all." 

Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in 
quest of the manager of the contracting company, 
whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to the 
roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words 
to explain our errand and complete arrangements for 
being transported down the lakes by the barge which 
was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes, 
which are each approximately ten miles in length and 
whose shores are lined with almost impenetrable forest, 
are connected by a shallow and tortuous channel which 

425 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

winds its devious course through a wilderness of 
swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned 
Lands. The firm of Spokane contractors engaged in 
the construction of the western division of the Grand 
Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious water- 
way for transporting its men, materials, and supplies 
to the front, using for the purpose flat-bottomed 
barges drawing only a few inches of water. Notwith- 
standing the fact that the pilots frequently lost their 
way at night and the barges went aground in the 
shallow channel, the fortunate circumstance of the 
two lakes being thus connected had saved the company 
tens of thousands of dollars. 

It will be a long time, a very long time, before my 
recollection of that night journey down those dark and 
lonely lakes will fade. The deck of the barge was but 
a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat in 
our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, 
it seemed as though the car were floating on the sur- 
face of the water. The little gasoline engine that sup- 
plied the barge's motive power was aft of us, and its 
steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light 
which our lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the 
final touch to the illusion. It was an eerie sensation — 
very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully through 
scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise 
the darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, 
which were as black as the grave and as silent as the 
dead. Once some heavy animal — a bear, no doubt — 
went crashing through the underbrush with a noise 

426 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

that was positively startling in that uncanny still- 
ness. By the time we reached the shallow channel that 
winds its devious course through the Drowned Lands 
the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had 
fallen on everything, hiding the shores with its impal- 
pable curtain and completely nullifying the effect of 
our powerful lights. The only sound was the laboured 
panting of the engine and the scraping of the bul- 
rushes against the bow. How the skipper found his 
way through that fog-bound channel I can't imagine, 
unless he smelt it, for he couldn't see an object five 
feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest 
when the barge crunched against the timbers of the 
wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed a little prayer 
of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell, 
I had fully expected that the light of morning would 
find us hard and fast aground in the middle of a swamp. 
Word of our coming had preceded us and we found that 
the company's local manager — an American — had cots 
and blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served 
him as an office. We were shivering with the cold and 
heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how we slept ! 
I can't remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow. 

Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addi- 
tion to our party. His name was Duncan and he was 
an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had the 
shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and 
could handle an axe as an artist handles a brush. One 
of those restless spirits who, with their worldly posses- 
sions on their backs, are here to-day and gone to-mor- 

427 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

row, he had worked on the railway grade just long 
enough to earn a little money and, when we arrived, 
was setting out on foot for New Hazelton, two hundred 
miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to work 
his passage and we were only too glad to have him 
along — he was so extremely capable that his presence 
gave us a feeHng of reassurance. It was well that we 
took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an 
hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of 
as ugly a stretch of road as I ever expect to set eyes on. 

"That's not a road," said my companion dis- 
gustedly, as he stood looking at the sea of slime. 
"That's a lake, and if we once get into it we'll never see 
the car again." 

What he said was so obviously true that we de- 
cided that the only thing to do was to avoid the road 
altogether and chop our way around it. This involved 
cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of pri- 
meval forest and the removal of scores of trees. There 
was nothing to be gained by groaning over the prospect, 
so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our lacerated palms, 
and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an ex- 
pert woodsman in action? No? Well, it's a sight 
worth seeing, take my word for it. Duncan would 
walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the 
Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double- 
bitted axe, amid a perfect shower of chips, until he had 
chopped a hole in the base the size of a hotel fireplace. 
A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning shout 
of "Timber!" "Timber!" and the great tree would 

428 




After the car had passed : a stretch of road south of the Nechako. 



:• ■■■■^l^fl^^ 


"^"■" 


: f-'7 ^S^-' ^'■- ■ ^ ',;£#•/ ^ 


^. "^ ■ - 




>> 



Mired in muskeg on the Yukon Telegraph Trail. 







ggU 






kT^^ikBHh^hBShBHIBB^^^^I^^^I 



Prying the car out cf a swamp in the Blackwater country. 



WHERE NO MOTOR-CAR HAD EVER GONE : SOME INCIDENTS OF MR. POWELL'S 
JOURNEY THROUGH THE BRITISH COLUMBIAN WILDERNESS. 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

come crashing down within a hand's breadth of where 
he wanted it. A few minutes more of the axe business 
and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and 
rolled away. "She's all jake, boys," Duncan would 
bellow, and, putting on the power, we would push the 
car a few yards more ahead. It took the four of us 
eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around 
that awful stretch of road, but we did get through 
finally with no more serious mishap than crumpling 
up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car swerv- 
ing into a tree. While we were still congratulating our- 
selves on having gotten out of the woods in more senses 
than one, we swung around a bend in the road and came 
to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which stretched 
away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye 
could see. 

"We're up against it good and hard this time," 
said our driver, grown pessimistic for the first and only 
time. "I don't believe the car can make it. There's too 
much of it and it's too deep — the wheels simply can't 
get traction." 

As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we 
heard the welcome rattle of wheels and clink of har- 
ness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn by eight 
sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the 
bearded "mule-skinner" urging on his beasts with 
cracking whip and a crackle of oaths. I waded toward 
him through the mire. 

"Where's the nearest place that we can eat and 
sleep?" I demanded. 

429 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

"Waal," he drawled with exasperating slowness, 
"I reckon's how they mought fix ye up fer the night at 
th' Hunderd an' Fifty Mile House. Thet's the only 
place I knows on, an' it's darned poor, too." 

"How far is it from here?" I asked. 

"Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o' two 
mile an' a half or three mile." 

" Good," said I, "and what will you charge to haul 
us there? We can't get through this mud-hole alone, 
but the car's got lots of power and with the help of 
your mules we ought to make it all right." 

Instantly the man's native shrewdness asserted 
itself. He cast an appraising eye over my mud-stained 
garments, over the mud-bespattered car and at the 
yawning sea of mud ahead. 

"I'll haul ye to th' Hunderd an' Fifty Mile House 
for fifteen dollars," he said. 

"Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?" 
I exclaimed. 

"Take it or leave it," said the teamster rudely. 
"I ain't got no time to stand in the road bargainin'." 

I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of 
letting our only hope of rescue get away. " Hitch on to 
the car," said I. 

That was where the sixteen-doUar-and-forty-cent 
chain to which I referred at the beginning of this story 
came in handy, for we had no rope that would have 
stood the strain of hauling that car through those three 
-perfectly awful miles. Night was tucking up the land 
in a black and sodden blanket when the driver pulled 

430 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

up his weary mules at the roadside post bearing the 
numerals "150," which signified that we were still a 
hundred and fifty miles from our journey's end, and I 
counted into his grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the 
greasy bank-notes of the realm. It had taken us just 
eleven hours to make fourteen miles. 

Though we had not deluded ourselves into expect- 
ing that we would find anything but the most primitive 
accommodation at the 150 Mile House, we were none 
of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for 
the wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Stand- 
ing in a clearing in the wilderness was a log cabin con- 
taining but a single room, in one comer of which was a 
stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with 
unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve- 
by-fourteen room was occupied by a huge home-made 
bed which provided sleeping quarters for the EngHsh 
rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable 
litter of small children. 

"We've nothing here that 'ud do for the likes of 
you, sir," said the man civilly, in reply to my request 
for accommodations. "The missis can fix you up a 
meal, but there's not a place that you could lay your 
heads, unless 'twould be in the loft." 

" Good Heavens, man ! " interrupted my compan- 
ion, "We can't sleep out-of-doors on such a night as 
this. Let's see the loft." 

Assuring us once more that "it was no place for 
the likes of us," the rancher pointed to a ladder made of 
saplings which poked its nose through a black square 

431 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking 
a candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light 
illuminated a space formed by the ceiling of the room 
below and the steeply pitched roof of the cabin, barely 
large enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees. 
Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was 
strewn with musty hay, upon which were thrown some 
tattered pieces of filthy burlap bagging. One of these 
pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon looking 
at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with 
vermin. I took one glance and scrambled down the 
ladder. "Where's the nearest ditch?" I asked. "I'd 
rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft." 

But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who 
had previous acquaintance of the place, wasting no 
time in lamentation, had set to work with his axe and 
in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of sparks 
into the evening sky. It's marvellous what wonders 
can be worked in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a 
man who knows how to handle it. By stretching the 
piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two conve- 
nient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an 
amazingly brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter 
which was proof against any but a driving rain, and 
which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front of it, 
was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Cov- 
ering the soggy ground with a layer of hemlock branches, 
and this in turn with a layer of hay bought from the 
rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on top 
of the hay our rubber sheets and Our blankets — ^be- 

432 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

hold, we were as comfortable as kings; more comfort- 
able, I fancy, than certain monarchs in the Balkans. 
We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sar- 
dines in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and 
the night wind soughed in the tree tops, and the flick- 
ering flames of the camp-fire alternately illumined and 
left in darkness everything. 

We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, 
which is an infrequent visitor to northern British Colum- 
bia in the autumn, had tardily come to our assistance 
and was trying to make up for its remissness by a des- 
perate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the suc- 
ceeding hundred miles or so, lay across an open, rolling 
country bordered by distant ranges of snow-capped 
mountains. Though the recollection of that day 
stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only 
one since leaving Quesnel when we were not delayed 
by mud, our progress was hampered by something 
much more inimical to the car — stumps. When the 
road was constructed it evidently never entered into 
the calculations of its builders that it would be used 
by a motor-car, so they sawed off the trees which occu- 
pied the route at a height which would permit of their 
stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles 
of the high-wheeled freight wagons, but which, had 
they been struck by the automobile, would have torn 
the pan from the body and put it permanently out of 
business. Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, 
our progress was necessarily slow, for Duncan marched 
in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before an ad- 

433 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

vancing army, and whenever he found an enemy in the 
form of a stump lying in wait to disable us he would 
destroy it with a few well-directed blows of his axe. 
But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however, 
the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an ex- 
cellent road of gravel, and down this we spun for thirty 
miles with nothing to interrupt our progress. When 
we started that morning we would have laughed deri- 
sively if any one had told us that we could make Alder- 
mere that night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing 
of good roads, we whirled into that little frontier vil- 
lage at five o'clock in the afternoon, ascertained from 
the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery 
store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, 
which was at that time the "end of steel," and deter- 
mined to push on that night. The good roads soon 
died a sudden death, however, and it was late that 
night before there twinkled in the blackness of the 
vaUey below us the bewildering arrangement of green 
and scarlet Hghts which denote a railway yard all the 
world over, and heard the famiHar friendly shriek of 
a locomotive. 

I don't care to dwell on the night we spent at 
Moricetown. The recollection is not a pleasant one. 
In a few years, no doubt, it will grow into a prosperous 
country village, with cement sidewalks and street 
lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were 
there it was simply the " end of steel." In other words, 
it was the place where civihsation, as typified by the 
railway in operation between there and the coast, quit 

434 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

work and the wilderness began. The " town " consisted 
of the railway station, still smelling of yellow paint, 
two or three log cabins, a group of hybrid structures, 
half house, half tent, and another building which, if 
one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have 
been called a hotel. Let me teU you about it. It was 
built of scantlings covered with log slabs, and the parti- 
tion walls consisted of nothing thicker than tarred 
paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for 
if you needed more light or air in your room all you 
had to do was to poke your finger through the wall. 
Because we had arrived by automobile and were there- 
fore fair game, we were given the suite de luxe. This 
consisted of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed 
with a dubious-looking coverlet which had evidently 
passed through every possible experience save a wash- 
ing. There being no place in the room for a wash- 
stand, the cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. 
Indeed, had not the door opened outward we could 
never have gotten into the room at all. The partitions 
were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the 
occupant of the next room changed his mind. Out- 
side our door was what, for want of a better term, I 
will call the lobby: a low-ceiUnged room warmed to 
the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, 
around which those who could not get rooms sat through 
the night on rude benches, talking, whispering, cursing, 
snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was 
blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing 
on the benches were all the types peculiar to this remote 

435 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

corner of the empire: Montenegrin and Croatian rail- 
way labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks 
in their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian 
ranchers from the back country; a group of immigrants, 
fresh from England, their faces whitened by the con- 
finement of the long journey, who had left their rented 
farms in Sussex or their stools in London counting- 
houses to come out to the colonies to earn a living; 
even some pallid women with squalling children in 
their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come 
from the old country to join their husbands and lead 
pioneer Hves in the British Columbian wild. The men 
snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded their 
crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied 
toward the ceiling, the army of insects that we found 
in possession of the bed attacked us from all directions, 
the rain pattered dishearteningly upon the tin roof, the 
air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked^ 
tired humanity. It was a nuit du diable, as our Paris 
friends would say. 

It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Mor- 
icetown to New Hazelton, the prefix "new" distin- 
guishing it from the "old town," which lies five miles 
from the railway to the north. The road, so we were 
told, though sHppery after the rains and very hilly, 
was moderately smooth, and we were as confident that 
we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as we 
were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid 
plans of mice and motorists, you know, "gang aft agley," 
which, according to the glossary of Scottish phrases 

436 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

in the back of the dictionary, means "to go off to the 
side," and that was precisely what we did, for when 
only five miles from our destination our driver, in his 
eagerness to taste civilised cooking again, took a slip- 
pery curve at incautious speed and the car skidded over 
into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank 
like some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the 
better part of an hour to get out the jacks and build 
a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at last 
everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to 
throw on the power. But there was no response from 
the engines to his pressure on the throttle. 

"By Jove!" he muttered despondently. "We're 
out of gasoline!" 

Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched 
and helpless car, a sky leaden with impending rain — 
and only five miles from our destination. There was 
nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazel- 
ton, rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, 
and bring us a tin of gasoline. The choice unanimously 
fell on Duncan, who set off down the middle of the 
mudd}^ road at a f our-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, 
we set about preparations for our Sunday dinner. 
While the driver skirmished about with an axe in 
search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn, 
my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, 
and I attempted to wash the knives and forks and tin 
plates in a convenient mud puddle. As we had neg- 
lected to clean them after our last meal in the open, 
on the ground that we would have no further use for 

437 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

them, the task I had set myself was not an easy one: 
it's surprising how difficult it is to remove grease from 
tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We 
achieved a meal at last, however — tinned sausages, 
tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread made palatable by 
toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in 
one of the thermos bottles and heated — and I've had 
many a worse meal, too. Just as the rain began to 
descend in earnest, a horse and sulky swung round the 
bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline. 
Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double 
line of welcoming townspeople down the muddy main 
street of New Hazelton. We were at our journey's end ! 

Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pre- 
tentious hotel in all the North country, when we were 
there this hostelry was still in course of construction, 
so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and 
board. After some searching we found accommoda- 
tion in the cabin occupied by the operator of the Yukon 
Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run by 
an American known as "Black Jack" Macdonald. 
And it was good eating, too. Our first question after 
reaching New Hazelton was, of course: 

"Is there any chance of our getting through to 
the Alaskan border?" 

"Not a chance in the world," was the chorused 
answer. But we protested that that was the answer 
we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and 
Quesnel and Fort Eraser when we inquired as to the 
chances of getting through to Hazelton. 

438 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

"The boys are quite right, gentlemen," said a 
bearded frontiersman named "Dutch" Cline. "There 
isn't a chance in the world. I've lived in this country 
close on twenty years and I know what I'm talking 
about. It's only about forty miles in an air-line from 
here to the Alaskan boundary, but I doubt if a pack- 
mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You 
would have to actually chop your way through forests 
that haven't so much as a trail. You would have to de- 
vise some way of getting your car across no less than a 
dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb to 
the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain 
range and then drop down on the other side; and, 
finally, you would have to find some means of crossing 
the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia 
from Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at 
hand and that you would probably be snowed in before 
you had got a quarter of the way, and you will under- 
stand just how utterly impossible it is." 

So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope 
of hearing the Alaskan gravel crunch beneath our 
tires and to content ourselves with the knowledge that 
we had driven farther north than a motor-car had 
ever been driven on this continent before: farther 
north than the Aleutian Islands, farther north than 
Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of 
Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in 
fact, than the southern boundary of Alaska itself. 

New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern 
British Columbia, where the Skeena, the Babine, and 

439 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as the lower 
end of the Alaskan panhandle. 

A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten 
shacks huddled on the river bank at the foot of the 
Rocher de Boule, whose cloud- wreathed summit, seven 
thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is 
one of those boom towns with which the pioneer busi- 
ness men of the region are shaking dice against fate. 
If they lose, the place will revert to the primeval 
wilderness from which it sprang; if they win — and the 
coming of the railway has made it all but certain that 
they will — they will have laid the foundation of a 
future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only in Con- 
stantinople during the stirring days which marked 
the end of the Hamidieh regime, and at Casablanca 
with the Foreign Legion, I do not recall ever having 
encountered so many strange and picturesque and 
interesting figures as I did in this log town on the 
ragged edge of things. Every evening after supper 
the men would come dropping into the hut by twos 
and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered 
in a circle about the whitewashed stove and the air 
was so thick with the fumes of Bull Durham that you 
could have cut it with a knife. Talk about the Ara- 
bian Nights! Those were the British Columbian 
Nights, and if the CaUph of Bagdad had sat in that 
circle of frontiersmen and listened to the tales that 
passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on 
the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded 
Scherezade in disgust. Here, in the flesh, were the 

440 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

characters of which the noveUsts love to write: men 
whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris 
chairs of ease; men who had gone the pace in England 
long ago; men who had left their country between two 
days and for their country's good; men who, in clubs or 
regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too 
many; men who, on nameless rivers or in strange 
valleys, had played knuckle down with Death. 

The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would 
generally be opened by "Dutch" Cline, a hairy, iron- 
hard pioneer who would have delighted the heart of 
Remington. I remember that the first time I met 
him he remarked that there would be an early winter, 
and when I asked him how he knew he explained quite 
soberly it was because he was aJfflicted with an uncon- 
trollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by 
birth — ^hence his nickname of "Dutch" — and in his 
youth had fought in turn the Zulus, the Basutos, and 
the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on 
the frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grass- 
hopper. He was a born raconteur and would hold us 
spellbound as he yarned of the days when he sailed 
under Captain Hansen, "the Flying Dutchman," and 
poached for seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was 
a Dane, evolved the ingenious idea of having a ship 
built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing 
under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled 
by a gunboat, whether American, British, Japanese, 
or Russian, and arrested for pelagic sealing, it stirred 
up such an international rumpus with all the other 

441 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. 
He once gave his vessel a coat of the grey-green paint 
used on the Czar's warships, uniformed his crew as 
Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe frowning 
from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting 
from his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing 
grounds, and when his unsuspecting rivals cut their 
cables and fled seaward he helped himself to the skins. 
Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained 
with blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he 
would have wished, but in a Httle harbour at the north 
end of Vancouver Island while trying to save a Uttle 
child. I remember that "Dutch" wiped his eyes as he 
told the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; 
for, though these men of the North have the hearts of 
vikings, they Hkewise often have the tenderness of a 
woman. 

Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed 
man-o'-war's man who had served under Dewey 
at the taking of the Philippines and later on had been 
a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging 
to reel off tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on 
every seaboard of the world, but when the deed for 
which he had been recommended for the Carnegie 
medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as 
his hair. So, as he could never be induced to tell the 
story, some one, to his intense embarrassment, would 
insist on telhng it for him. While prospecting in that 
remote and barren region which borders on the Great 
Slave Lake his only companion had gone suddenly 

442 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

insane. MacDonald bound the raging madman hand 
and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of whip- 
sawed planks, and brought him down a thousand miles 
of unexplored and supposedly unnavigable rivers, 
sometimes dragging his flimsy craft across mile-long 
portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by 
foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height, 
sometimes running cataracts and rapids where his life 
hung on the twist of a paddle, living on wild berries 
and such game as he could kill along the way, but 
always caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as 
though he were a child. He reached New Hazelton 
and its hospital with his charge at last, after one of 
the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man 
— and the next day his comrade died. Yet when I 
exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was genuinely 
abashed. "Hell," he blurted, "what else was there 
for me to do ? You wouldn't have had me go off and 
leave him up there to die, would you? You'd do the 
same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure 
you would." 

When his instrument would cease its chatter for 
a time, the telegraph operator would chip in with 
stories of the men who sit in those lonely cabins scat- 
tered along two thousand miles of copper wire and 
relay the news of the world to the miners of the Yukon. 
In hair-raising detail he told of that terrible winter 
when the pack-train with its supplies was lost and the 
snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive 
for many months upon such scanty game as they 

443 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

could find in the frozen forests. He told of the insuf- 
ferable loneliness that drives men raving mad, of the 
awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told, 
with the thrill in the voice that comes only from 
actual experience, of how men run from their own 
shadows and become frightened at the sound of their 
own voices; of how each succeeding day is the intoler- 
able same, only a little worse, the messages that come 
faintly over the line being the sole relief from the 
awful feehng that you are the only person left on all 
the earth. 

Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline 
as he is invariably called because of his Catalonian 
origin, would join our conversazione. His ninety odd 
years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a 
man, six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a 
chest like a barrel, his mop of snowy hair in striking 
contrast to a skin which has been tanned by sun and 
wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meer- 
schaum. CataHne is the most noted packer in the 
whole North country, being, in fact, the owner of the 
last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande. So 
much of his Hfe has been spent in the wild, with Indian 
packers and French-Canadian trappers for his only 
companions, that his speech has become a strange 
melange of EngHsh, French, half a dozen Indian dia- 
lects, and some remnants of his native Spanish, the 
whole thickly spiced with oaths. When, upon his 
periodic visits to the settlements, he is compelled to 
sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets and, 

444 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort 
on the floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he 
can shoot through the coverings in case a marauder 
should appear. It is a custom among those who know 
him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of 
enjoying the unique performance that ensues. His 
invariable brand of "hooch" is Hudson Bay rum, 
strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler. 
"Salue, seiiores!" says the old Spaniard, and drains 
half his glass at a single gulp. But he does not drink 
the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly over his 
mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a 
strange performance. 

They tell with rehsh in the northern camps the 
story of how Old Man Cataline, summoned to appear 
before the court sitting at Quesnel to defend the title 
to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into 
the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and, 
shoving aside the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the 
startled judge. "Je worka pour that land, senor!" 
he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole frame 
trembling with passion. " Je payez pour heem, mister ! 
He belonga to moi ! Je killa any one who try tak heem 
away! Oui, by God, je killa you, m'sieu!" and, 
drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its 
blade deep into the top of the judge's table. Leaving 
this grim memento quivering in the wood, Cataline 
turned upon his heel and strode away. He was not 
molested. 

When the world was electrified by the news that 
445 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

gold had been discovered on the Yukon, the authori- 
ties at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of the 
lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body 
of troops to the scene for the preservation of law and 
order. To Old Man Cataline was intrusted the task 
of transporting the several hundred soldiers and their 
supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train. 
The officer in command was a pompous person, fresh 
from the Eastern provinces and much impressed with 
his own importance, who insisted that the routine of 
barrack hfe should be rigidly observed upon the long 
and tedious march through the wilderness, the men 
rising and eating and going to bed by bugle-call. 
The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt 
of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: "Pour cin- 
quante, soixante year I live in the grand foret. Je 
connais when it ees time to get up. Je connais when I 
am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now it 
ees blowa de bug' to get up; blowa de bug' to eat; 
blowa de damned bug' to sleep. Nom d'un nom d'un 
nomduchien! What t' ell for?" Within twenty-four 
hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not 
on speaking terms. But the expedition continued to 
press steadily forward, the commander riding at the 
head of the mile-long string of soldiers on mule back, 
and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heav- 
ily laden pack-mule became mired in a marsh and, 
despite the orders of the officer and the efforts of the 
soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were stand- 
ing in deep perplexity about the helpless animal 

446 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

Cataline came riding up from the rear. Pulling up 
his mule, he sat quietly in his saddle without volun- 
teering any advice. At last the officer, at his wit's 
end, pocketed his pride. 

"How would you suggest that we get this mule 
out, Mr. Cataline?" he asked politely. 

" Oh," remarked the old frontiersman drily, "blowa 
de bug'." 

Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a 
genial Irish section boss on the Grand Trunk Pacific, 
whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a grateful relief 
to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had 
a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one 
of his chief delights was to lean back in his chair and 
write patriotic "G. R.'s" and "U. S. A.'s" in squirts 
of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he ordered 
out his hand-car in a hurry. 

"And where moight yez be goin', Misther Fla- 
herty?" solicitously inquired his assistant. 

"To hell wid yer questions," was the answer. 
"Did Napoleon always be tellin' his min where he was 
goin'?" 

The Indians of British Columbia, doubtless be- 
cause of their remoteness from civilisation, have re- 
tained far more of their racial customs and character- 
istics than have their cousins below the international 
boundary. Though divided into innumerable clans 
and tribes, under local names, they fall naturally, on 
hnguistic grounds, into a few large groups. Thus, the 

447 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

southern portion of the hinterland is occupied by the 
Sahsh and the Kootenay; in the northern interior are 
to be found the Tinneh or Athapackan people; while 
the Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiatles, and Nootkas have 
their villages along the coast, though the white settlers 
speak of them collectively as Siwashes, "Siwash" 
being nothing more than a corruption of the French 
sauvage. These British Columbian aborigines are strik- 
ingly Oriental in appearance, having so many of the 
facial characteristics of the Mongol that it does not 
need the arguments of an ethnologist to convince one 
that they owe their origin to Asia. Indeed, it is a 
common saying that if you cut the hair of a Siwash 
you will find a Japanese. They are generally short 
and squat of figure and, though habitually lazy, are 
possessed of almost incredible endurance. One of them 
was pointed out to me, a brave named Chickens, who 
packed a piece of machinery weighing three hundred 
pounds over one hundred and eighty miles of rough 
forest trails in twelve days. Some years ago the In- 
dians of the Hag-wel-get village constructed a suspen- 
sion bridge of rope and timbers across the dizzy chasm 
at the bottom of which flows the raging Bulkley. 
This bridge is an interesting piece of work, for in build- 
ing it the Indians adopted the cantilever system, a 
form of construction generally supposed to be beyond 
the comprehension of uncivilised peoples. But the 
amazing feature of the structure is that the varying 
members are not secured together by nails, bolts, or 
screws but simply lashed with willow withes. It is 

448 




"Some of the cemeteries look as though they were filled with white-enamelled cribs.' 




The grave-house of a chieftain near Kispiox. 



rum 






mtmiim^ 


i-m.-^---^ jmmmm 


^;^^'l-yW^^ ■. ,- ^ 


mtKmZ'*'" '■- '^;''' 


j^^^P"***-'-". 


^ 





"Over each grave is a house which is a cross between ... a Turkish kiosk and a Chinese pagoda.' 
SOME SIWASH CEMETERIES. 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

a crazy-looking affair, and when you venture on it it 
creaks, groans, and swings as if threatening to collapse. 
Even the weight of a dog is sufficient to set it vibrating 
sickeningly. When it was completed, the Indians 
were evidently in some doubt as to the stability of 
their handiwork, for they tested it by sending a score 
of kloochmen out upon the quivering structure. If 
it held, well and good — it was strong enough to bear 
the weight of an Indian; if it gave way — oh, well, there 
were plenty of other squaws where those came from. 

The Siwashes bury their dead in some of the 
strangest cemeteries in the world, over each grave 
being erected a grave house of grotesquely carved and 
gaudily painted wood, which is a cross between a dog 
kennel, a chicken-coop, a Chinese pagoda, and a Turkish 
kiosk. In these strange mausoleums the personal 
belongings and gewgaws of the dear departed are 
prominently displayed. It may be a trunk or a dress- 
ing-table, usually bedecked with vases of withered 
flowers; from a line stretched across the interior of 
the structure hang the remnants of his or her clothing, 
and always in a conspicuous position is a photograph 
of the deceased. Though sometimes several hundred 
dollars are expended in the erection of one of these 
quaint structures, as soon as the funeral rites are over 
the tomb is left to the ravages of wind and rain, not a 
cent being expended upon its up-keep. Of recent 
years, however, those Indians who can afford it are 
abandoning the old-time wooden grave houses for 
elaborate enclosures of wire netting which gave the 

449 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

cemeteries the appearance of being filled with enamelled 
iron cribs. Perhaps their most curious custom, how- 
ever, is that of potlatch giving. A potlatch is gener- 
osity carried to the nth degree. Some of them are very 
grand affairs, the Indians coming in to attend them 
from miles around. It is by no means unusual for an 
Indian to actually beggar himself by his munificence 
on these occasions, a wealthy chieftain who gave a 
potlatch recently at Kispiox piling blankets, which 
are the Indians' chief measure of wealth, around a 
totem-pole to a height of forty feet. 

The Siwash villages are usually built high on a 
bank above some navigable stream, the totem-poles 
in front of the miserable cabins being so thick in 
places as to look from a distance like a forest that has 
been ravaged by fire. The Skeena might, indeed, be 
called the Totem-Pole River, for from end to end it is 
bordered by Indian villages whose grotesquely carven 
spars proclaim to all who traverse that great wilderness 
thoroughfare the genealogies of the families before 
whose dwellings they are reared. Though the Siwashes 
are accustomed to desert a village when the fishing 
and hunting run out and establish themselves else- 
where, their totem-poles may not be disturbed with 
impunity, as some business men of Seattle once found 
out. A few years ago the Seattle Chamber of Commerce 
arranged an excursion to Alaska, chartering a steamer 
for the purpose. While returning down the British 
Columbian coast, the vessel dropped anchor for a few 
hours at the head of a fiord, off a deserted Siwash 

4SO 




3> 
o 



£> 



■$.0 



(l^ 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

village whose water-front was lined with imposing 
totem-poles. 

"Say," said an enterprising business man, "this 
place is deserted, all right, all right. The Indians have 
evidently gotten out for good. So what's the matter 
with our chopping down that big totem -pole over there, 
hoisting it on deck, and taking it back to Seattle? 
It'll look perfectly bully set up in Pioneer Square." 

Every one agreed that it was, indeed, a perfectly 
bully suggestion and it was carried out, the purloined 
pole being erected in due time in the heart of Seattle's 
business section, where it stands to-day. The affair 
received considerable notice in the newspapers, of 
course, and those responsible for thus adding to the 
city's attractions were editorially patted on the back. 
A few weeks later, however, they were served with 
papers in a civil suit brought against them by the In- 
dians from whose village, without so much as a by- 
your-leave, they had removed the pole. At first they 
jeered at the idea of a handful of Siwash villagers 
dweUing up there on the skirts of civihsation having 
any rights which they could enforce in a court of 
law, but they soon found that it was no laughing 
matter, for the Indians, backed by the British Colum- 
bian Government, pressed their claim and it cost the 
gentlemen concerned four thousand dollars for their 
Siwash souvenir. 

Everything considered, British Columbia is, I 
believe, the finest game country in the western hem- 
isphere, bar none, for the sportsmen have as yet barely 

451 



THE END OF THE TRAIL 

nibbled at its edges. It is to America, in fact, what 
the Victoria Nyanza country is to Africa: a veritable 
sportsman's paradise, to make use of a term which 
the writers of railway folders have taken for their 
own. It is the sole remaining region south of Alaska 
where the hunter can go with almost positive assurance 
that he will have a chance to draw a bead upon a grizzly 
bear; mountain sheep and goat are seen so frequently 
on the slopes of the Rocher de Boule, at the back of 
New Hazelton, that they do not provoke even passing 
comment; the islands off the province's ragged coast 
are the only habitat of that vara avis, the spotted 
bear; musk-ox and wood-buffalo, among the scarcest 
big game in existence, still graze on the prairies which 
are watered by the headwaters of the Mackenzie and 
the Peace; elk, caribou, and mule-deer are as common 
as squirrels in Central Park; wolves, wolverenes, 
lynxes, and the fox in all its species, to say nothing of 
the beaver, the marten, and the mink, still make the 
province one of the richest fur grounds in the world. 
Wild fowl literally blacken its lakes and fiords in the 
spring and autumn; grouse and pheasant, as I have 
previously remarked, are so tame that they can be 
and are killed with a club; while salmon, trout, and 
sturgeon fill the countless streams, sometimes in such 
vast numbers that they actually choke the smaller 
creeks and rivers. When there is taken into considera- 
tion the fact of its comparative accessibility (New 
Hazelton can be reached from Seattle in a little more 
than three days) and the healthfulness of its climate — 

452 




The Rocher de Boule from the Indian village of Awillgate. 




The Upper Fraser at Quesnel. This is the head of steamer navigation and the end of the 

Cariboo Trail. 




The Babine Range from Old Hazelton. 

A LAND OF SUBLIMITY AND MAGNIFICENCE AND GRANDEUR, OF 
GLOOM AND LONELINESS AND DREAD. 



THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 

for British Columbia, unlike most of the other cele- 
brated hunting-grounds, is distinctly a "white man's 
country" — ^it is almost incomprehensible why it has 
not attracted far greater attention from the men who 
go into the wild with rod and gun. 

It is a land of immensity and majesty and oppor- 
tunity, is this almost unknown empire in the near-by 
North. It is a region of sublimity and magnificence 
and grandeur, of gloom and loneliness and dread. It 
is as savage as a grizzly, as alluring as a lovely woman. 
Its scenery is of the set-piece and drop-curtain kind. 
Streams of threaded quicksilver, coming from God 
knows where, hasten through deep-gashed valleys as 
though anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns. 
On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black bat- 
talions, stand the bleak barbarian pines, while above 
the scented pine gloom, like blanketed chiefs in council 
under the wigwam of the sky, the snow peaks gleam 
in splendour, and behind them, beyond them, the sun- 
god paints his canvas in the West. Pregnant with the 
seed of unborn cities, potent in resources and possi- 
bilities beyond the stranger's ken, it lies waiting to 
be conquered: 

"The last and the largest empire, 
The map that is half unrolled." 



453 



INDEX 



Abbott, Judge, ranch-house of, 22. 

Acoma, New Mexico, 22, 35, 40-55; 
antiquity, 44; costumes, 52, 53; 
church, 48, 49; customs, 44, 55; 
dwellings, 46; funeral, 51; grave- 
yard, 51; houses, 45-47; indus- 
tries, S3, 54; paths to, 42; people 
of, 42; picture of San Jos6 in, 49, 
so; police, 58; site of, 40, 41, 45; 
symbolic hair-dressing, 54, 55; 
women, 53-55. 

Agricultural College, Oregon, 315, 
316. 

Agriculture, United States Depart- 
ment of, 98. 

Alaska, 381, 438, 439. 

Alberni, B. C, 363, 375, 376. 

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 13-16, 
35 ; agricultural possibilities, 14; 
climate, 13; commercial club, 14, 
15; university at, 15. 

Alcatraz, prison at, 218. 

Aldermere, B. C, 434. 

Alejandro, Padre, 179. 

Alfalfa raising, 9, 74, 75, 100, 260. 

Algiers, 190. 

Amargosa River, the, 174. 

"American Alps," the, 217. 

"American Mentone," the, 217. 

American River, the, 229, 230. 

American School of Archaeology, 23, 

25- 

Anacapa Island, 151 

Anacortes, 344. 

Apple orchards, Oregon, 296, 297, 

318, 319. 
Archasological research in the United 

States, 22-25. 
Architecture, California, 199, 200. 
Arizona, 31; admitted to the Union, 

79; cities, 80; climate, 83-85; 

contrasted with Egypt, 71; copper 

output, 81; desert, 72, 73; early 



inhabitants, 77; effects of civiliza- 
tion in, 63-65; game-hunting, 85- 
87; history of, 76-79, 91; irriga- 
tion, 70, 88, 93, 94; misconcep- 
tions concerning, 71, 74; missions, 
91-93; organised as territory, 79; 
people law-abiding, 88, 89; pio- 
neers, 67-69, 79; prison system, 
89, 90; products of the soil, 74-76; 
progress in, 66-69; two distinct 
regions of, 87, 88. 

Arizona Rangers, the, 89. 

Ark, the, 376, 377. 

Arroyo Hondo, 56. 

Ashcroft, B. C, 391-6. 

Ashland, Oregon, 323. 

Automobiles, in Oregon, 313. 

Avalon, Santa Catalina, 148-151. 

Bakersfield, California, 259-261,324. 

Banning Company, the, 147. 

Barbarenos, 152, 153. 

Barkerville, B. C, 392. 

Barrancas, 56. 

Bay of Monterey, the lost, 195. 

Beaman, Judge, 150. 

BelUngham, 348. 

"BenHur," 16. 

Benedict, Judge Kirby, 50. 

Benicia, California, 219, 220. 

Bent, Governor, 21. 

Big-game hunting, 85-87, 347, 451-3- 

Big trees of Cahfornia, 254, 255, 257, 

258. 
Bisbee, Arizona, 87. 
Black Hills, 81. 

Blackwater, B. C, 401, 405, 406. 
Blaine, 348, 349. 
Boar-hunting, 153. 
Bobtail Lake, B. C, 403, 404. 
Bohemian Club of San Francisco, 

the, 158, 202. 
Bohemians in Cahfornia, 282, 283. 



455 



INDEX 



Borax deposits, 174, 177. 

Bradshaw Mountains, 82. 

Bret Harte, 229, 230. 

Bridge built by Indians, 448, 449. 

Bridget, Jim, 56. 

British Columbia, 209, 355, et seq.; 
area, 358, 359; character of the 
country, 362, 363, 453; cities of, 
363,364; climate, 361; corduroy- 
ing roads in, 411, 412; cutting 
path through forest, 428, 429; 
freighters, 398; frontier, 389 et 
seq., 421 et seq.; game-hunting, 
451-3; government's interest in 
settlers, 407; Indians, 415, 447- 
451; "muskeg," 410, 411; pioneers 
in, 38s, 386, 390, 397 et seq.; pro- 
hibition in, 407-9; railways, 378- 
382; resources, 359-361; roads, 
411, 415, 416, 433- 

British Colxmibia Express Company, 

391, 392. 
Brussels, restoration of, 17. 
Bryce, James, 299. 
Bunk-houses, British Columbia, 413. 
Bureau of Indian Affairs, 58. 
Burlingame, California, 198, 199. 
Bums Lake, B. C, 424, 425. 
Busch Gardens, Pasadena, 141. 

Cabbage-growing in New Mexico, 
10. 

Cabrillo, Juan Rodrigues, 147, 171, 
172. 

Cabrillo, the, 147, 149. 

Caire estate, the, 152. 

California Debris Commission, 226. 

California, 160 et seq.; agriculture 
of, 218; architecture, 199, 200; 
Chinese in, 207; climate, 157-9; 
coast, 161, 162; discovery of, 
172; dust, 159; festivals, 201-3; 
fogs, 159; Great Valley of, 242-4; 
hinterland, 240 et seq.; Japanese 
in, 207-210; labour problems in, 
206-8; missions, 117-122, 179, 
180, 183, 186, 19s, 198; orange 
groves, 125-8, 133-8; popular mis- 
nomers, 216, 217; rain, 158; roads, 



116, 132, 197, 198; seaside resorts, 

142-4; summer climate, 157-160; 

three distinct zones of, 157; trees, 

254-8. 
Camels, wild, 86, 87. 
Camino Real, El, 21, 108, 115, 122, 

161, 178, 185, 197, 198. 
Camp Sierra, 257. 
Canada, agricultural invasion of, 

357, 358; motoring in, 348-35°; 

railways, 378-381. 
Canadian Northern Railway, 378- 

381. 
Canadian Pacific Railway, 378-380, 

395- 

Canal at Celilo, 291. 

Canon of the Macho, 21; of the 
Santa Fe, 21. 

Canons, 21, 23. 

Canon's Crest, 131. 

Cape Flattery, 344. 

Cape Horn, 232, 301. 

Caravels, miniature, 171, 172. 

Cariboo Trail, the, 391-9. 

Carmel, mission of, 183. 

Carpenteria, California, 166. 

Carquinez Straits, the, 219. 

Carson, Kit, 21, 56. 

Casa Grande, ruins of, 91, 94; irriga- 
tion, no. 

Cascade Range, the, 277, 285, 293, 
29s, 298-300, 310. 

Casitas Pass, the, 166. 

Casteneda, 45. 

Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, 81-83. 

Castle Rock, 301. 

Castro, General, 186. 

Catalina Range, 85. 

Cattle-raising in New Mexico, 26. 

Caux, Eugene (Old Man Cataline), 

444-7- 
Cave-dwellers, 22-25. 
Caves, painted, of Santa Cruz, 151; 

Oregon, 324. 
Celilo, canal at, 291. 
Channel Islands, the, 146-154. 
Charles the Second of Aragon, 49. 
Chinese, in California, 207; farming, 

7,8. 



456 



INDEX 



Church, adobe, at Acoma, 48-50. 

Civil War, 79. 

Clarksburg, California, 223. 

Cline, "Dutch," 439, 441. 

Cloud Cap Inn, 297. 

Coast Range, the, 241. 

Colorado Desert, 98. 

Colorado River, the, 99, 100. 

Colton Hall, Monterey, 183. 

Columbia, of Boston, the, 303. 

Columbia River, the, 273 et seq.; In- 
dian legend, 293-5; length of, 289, 
290; romance of, 292-6; salmon, 
302; scenery, 290, 299-301; traffic, 
301, 302; waterfalls, 300, 301. 

Commerce of the prairies, 20, 21. 

Commercial Club in Albuquerque, 

14, IS- 
Contra Costa County ,'Califomia, 219. 
Copper mines, 32, 81. 
Coronado, California, 103-7, 216; 

hotel, 105-7; Polo Club, 104; Tent 

City, 112, 113. 
Coronado, Don Francisco Vasquez 

de, expedition of, 45, 78, 115. 
Coronados Islands, the, 146. 
Cotton, Egyptian, 75, 76. 
Coulterville, CaUfomia, 256; road, 

246. 
Crater Lake, 285, 286. 
Crocker's Sierra Resort, 246, 247. 
Czechs, 282, 

Dalton Divide, the, 21, 22. 

Dams, Laguna and Roosevelt, 70, 88, 
91, 93, 94; Elephant Butte, no. 

Date, the Algerian, 75, 76; the Deg- 
let Noor, 100. 

Death Valley, 83, 172-8; borax de- 
posits, 177; climatic variation, 
176; effects of ultra-rarefied air, 
175; sand-storms, 176, 177. 

Decker Lake, 425-8. 

Del Mar, California, 11 7-9. 

Del Monte, California, 184, 185. 

Deming, New Mexico, 3-8, 13. 

Denver, 21. 

Depew, Chauncey, 84, 85. 

Deschutes, the, 287. 



Desert, Arizona, 72, 73; Colorado, 

98; New Mexican, 36, 38, 39. 
Dikes on the Sacramento, 226, 227. 
Donner Lake, 233, 
Donner party tragedy, story of, 233, 

234- 
Drain, Oregon, 323. 
Drowned Lands, the, 426, 428. 
Dry Lake Ranch, 282. 
Duncan, woodsman, 427-433, 437, 

438. 
Dungeness, 344. 

Easter pilgrimage, 129-131. 

Egypt, 71, 72. 

El Centro, loi, 102. 

El Paso, 21. 

Elephant Butte, dam at, no. 

Elkins, Stephen B., 21. 

English in New Mexico, 12; pioneers 

in the North, 399-403. 
Erosion, Acoma, a striking example 

of, 41. 
Eugene, Oregon, 317, 320, 323. 

Fair, Oregon State, 312-7. 

Farms, New Mexico, 7-1 1; Oregon, 

314, Sis- 
Feast of the Blossoms, the, 192, 193, 

201. 
Festivities, California out-of-door, 

201-3. 
Fishing, deep-sea, at Avalon, 149- 

iSi- 

Fishing industry of the Sacramento, 
220, 221. 

Fish-wheels, 302. 

Flaherty, Michael, 447. 

Floral mosaic, 267. 

Florence, Arizona, State peniten- 
tiary at, 89. 

Folsom, California, 229. 

Foot-hills Hotel, the, 164-6. 

Forests, Sierran, 266. 

Fort Fi-aser, B. C, 390, 395, 399, 
416, 421-4; cost of provisions in, 
422. 

Fort George, B. C, 393, 408, 409. 

Fowl, wild, 220. 



457 



INDEX 



Fraser River, the, 391, 392, 398. 
Freight wagons, British Columbian, 

398. 
Fremont, 115, 186, 228. 
Fresno, California, 256. 
Friday Harbour, 344. 
Frontier, the last, 389 et seq., 421 et 

seq. 
Frontiersmen, British Columbian, 

440-7. 
Frost in the orange belt, 133, 257. 
Fruit-growing, in Arizona, 75. 
Fruit-packing industry, 205. 
Funeral Range, the, 173, 174. 
Furnace Creek, 174. 

Gadsden Treaty, 79. 

Gasoline, cost of in British Colmnbia, 

394, 395- 
Gaviota Pass, the, 178. 
General Grant Big Tree Grove, 257. 
Gila River, the, 9, 79, 83, no. 
Gilroy, California, 196. 
Glacier meadows, 266, 267. 
Globe, Arizona, 90. 
Goat, wild, 153. 
Gold discovery, California, 79, 173, 

224. 
Gold dredger, 230-2. 
Golden Gate, the, 241. 
Golf-links, California, 159, 185. 
Grand Island, 227. 
Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 364, 

378-382, 384, 408, 426. 
Grant's Pass, Oregon, 323, 324. 
Great Central Lake, B. C, 220, 375, 

376. 
Great Valley of California, the, 242 

et seq.; irrigation of, 243, 244; 

petroleum fields, 258, 259. 
Grove Play, Bohemian Club's, 158, 

202, 203. 

Halleck, 183. 
Harriman, E. H., 284. 
Hawk's Nest, the, 186. 
Heenan, the "Benicia Boy," 220. 
High Sierras, the, 266. 



Highways, 21, 102, 108, 114-8, 161, 
166, 197, 198, 215, 229, 278. 

Hillsboro, California, 198; Oregon, 
326. 

Holland, waterways of, 215, 216. 

Hollanders in New Mexico, 13. 

Hollywood, CaUfomia, 199. 

Homestead and Desert Land Acts, 

6, 323- 
Honey Lake, 279, 280. 
Hood River, 296, 297. 
Hopi Indians, 16, 47, 53-59. 
Horton, Alonzo, 108. 
Hot Springs Junction, 81. 
Hotel Arlington, 170, 171; del Co- 

ronado, 105-7; The Foot-hills, 

164-6. 
Hund, John, 6. 
Hundred and Fifty Mile House, the, 

430-2. 
Hunt, Governor George W. P., 79, 

89. 
Hunting big game in Arizona, 85-87; 

in British Columbia, 451-3; in the 

Puget Sound country, 347. 
Hydraulic mining, 226, 230. 

Imperial Valley, the, 8, 97-102, no, 
194; agricultural products, 100; 
highway into, 102, 103; irrigation 
of, 99; soil expert's report concern- 
ing, 98, 99; towns in, loi. 

Indian education, 47, 48; legend of 
the Columbia, 293-5; punish- 
ments, 58-60; revolt of 1680, 19, 
78; settlement in the Yosemite, 
250-2; sheep-owners, 27. 

Indians, Palatingwa, 120, 121; Hopi, 
16, 47, 53-59; Siwash, 415, 447- 

451- 
Invalids, in Albuquerque, 13, 
Iron Hills, the, 279. 
Irrigarion, 5, 6, 8, 14, 30, 32, 70, 88, 

93, 94, 99, no, 225-7, 243, 246. 
Isleton, California, 223. 

Japanese in California, 207-210. 
Jewellery, Indian, 53. 



458 



INDEX 



Kalama, 331, 332. 

Katzimo, 40, 41. 

Kearney Boulevard, the, 256. 

Kearney, General, 19, 20. 

King's Highway. (See Camino Real.) 

Kino, Jesuit Father, 91. 

Klamath Falls, 283-5. 

La Jolla, California, 117. 

Labour problems in California, 

206-8. 
Laguna, New Mexico, 35, 37, 38, 49, 

50; dam, 70, 88. 
Lake Chapala, 220. 
Lake of Elsinore, 117. 
LakeTahoe, 228, 232, 235, 236, 264- 

270. 
Larkin house, Monterey, 183. 
Leland Stanford, Jr., University, 

197. 
Lick, James, 147. 
Linda Vista grade, the, 114, 
Lisa, Manuel, 56. 
Long Beach, California, 143. 
Los Angeles, California, 142-5, 209; 

harbour, 144, 145; name, 139. 
Los Gatos, 191. 
Los Olivos, inn at, 180, 181. 
Lummis, Charles, 139. 

Macdonald, "Black Jack," 438. 
MacDonald, Bob, 442, 443. 
Machine shearing, 27. 
Madera, California, 256. 
Manzano Ranges, the, 14. 
"Marble Halls of Oregon," the, 324. 
Marcos de Niza, 78. 
Mare Island Navy Yard, 219. 
Mariposa Big Tree Grove, 254, 255. 
Mark Twain, 230. 
Marshall, John, 229. 
Matilija Valley, the, 162, 164. 
Meadows, mountain, 266, 267. 
Medford, Oregon, 319, 323. 
Mediterranean Riviera, the, 161. 
Memaloose, the Island of the Dead, 

293- 
Merced Big Tree Grove, 247, 256. 



Mesa Encantada, La (the Enchanted 
Mesa), 39-41. 

Mexican War, 79. 

Mexicans, in New Mexico, 28, 29. 

Mihtiamen, Canadian, 372, 373. 

Miller, Frank, 121. 

Mimbres Valley, the, 6 et seq., 32; 
climate, 8, 9. 

Mining, 226, 230-2. 

Miramar, California, 167. 

Mission Inn at Riverside, 121, 127. 

Mission Valley, 117. 

Missions, Arizona, 91-93; California, 
117-122, 179, 180, 183, 186, 195, 
198. 

Modesto, California, 246. 

Mojave City, Arizona, 87. 

Montecito, California, 167, 199, 223. 

Monterey, California, 159, 181-5, 
19s, 216; historic interest of, 182, 
183. 

Morehouse, Colonel C. P., 150. 

Moricetown, B. C, 434-6. 

Motoring in British Columbia, 348- 
350.372,439; in California, 1 13-8, 
132, 166, 228, 261-4, 278, 279; in 
Oregon, 320; in the Yosemite, 
246-8, 254. 

Mount Adams, 295; Hamilton, 191; 
Hood, 295, 298; Hooker, 346; 
Lowe, 142; Rubidoux, 128, 129; 
Rainier, 337-340, 347; Shasta, 
160; Saint Helens, 295; San Ja- 
cinto, 160; Tamalpais, 219; To- 
potopo, 163. 

Moving pictures taken in the West, 
64, 90, 171. 

Muir, John, 249. 

Nanaimo, 363, 372, 373. 
Napoleon, 182. 
Natalie, the, 182. 
Nechako River, the, 424. 
Nehalem Bay, 326. 
"Netherlands Route," the, 217. 
New Hazelton, B. C, 380, 381, 428, 

436-440, 443, 452. 
"New Helvetia," 227. 
New Mexico, annexation of, 19, 20; 



459 



INDEX 



changes in, 3 et seq.; character of 
the people, 31, 32; climate of, 8, 
9; desert, 36, 38, 39; dress, 10; 
farming in, 7-1 1; fuel, 11; indus- 
tries, 25-28; Mexicans in, 28, 29; 
mineral deposits, 32; prosperity 
of, 31, 32; religious fanaticism, 29, 
30; settlers in, 10-13; social 
fabric, 28, 30; Spanish spoken in, 
29; turquoise deposits, 32; water 
discovery, s, 6; well-digging, 11; 
white population, 30. 

New Westminster, B. C, 350, 363. 

Nisqually Glacier, the, 338-340, 

Oak Knoll, California, 199. 

Oceanside, California, 11 7-9. 

Oil-fields, California, 258, 259. 

Ojai Valley, the, 162-6. 

Olympia, 336. 

Oiiate, Juan de, 19, 51. 

Orange groves of California, 125-8, 
133-8, 257. 

Oregon, 307-328; Agricultural Col- 
lege, 315; apple orchards, 296, 
318,319; caves, 324; character of 
the country, 324-8; charm of, 
326-8; climate, 327; emigration 
to, 321-3; farmer, 313-6; a fron- 
tier country, 325; hinterland, 275 
et seq., 309, 310; opportunities in, 
322; prohibition in, 323,324; rail- 
road, 325-7; State Fair, 312-7; 
timber, 322; towns, 308, 323, 324. 

Oregon Trail, the, 276. 

"Our Italy," 216. 

Pacific Great Eastern Railway, 379- 

380. 
Pack-train on the Cariboo Trail, 397. 
"Padre's Path," 42. 
Pajarito National Park, 22-25. 
Pala, San Antonia de, mission chapel, 

117, 120. 
Palatingwa tribe, the, 120, 121. 
Palo Alto, 197, 198. 
Panamint Range, the, 174. 
Pasadena, California, 13 1-3, 138- 

142, 170, 201, 223; Busch Gardens, 



140, 141; Mount Lowe, 140, 142; 

Orange Grove Avenue, 140, 141. 
Pecos, the, valley of, 9, 32; Forest 

Reserve, 22. 
Pelican Bay Lodge, 285. 
Pelicans, 283. 
Penitentes, the, 29, 30. 
Petroleum fields, California, 258, 

259- 
PhiUp III, 147. 
Phoenix, Arizona, 80, 83, 90, 91, 93, 

no. 
Pillars of Hercules, 301, 
Pilot Peak, 278. 
Pio Pico, 147. 

Placerville, California, 228, 229, 232. 
Plaza del Mar, Santa Barbara, 169, 

171. 
Point Loma, 103. 
Polo Club at Coronado, 104. 
Port Abemi, B. C, 376. 
Port Angeles, 344. 
Port Mann, B. C, 380. 
Portland, Oregon, 202, 308, 331, 332, 

341; residences, 311. 
Portola, Don Caspar de, 195, 210. 
Prescott, Arizona, 80, 81. 
Prince Rupert, B. C, 379-384, 390. 
Prison system, Arizona, 89. 
Prunes, California, 193. 
Pueblo system of government, 58. 
Puget Sound country, the, 341-7; 

a trip through, 343-5; variety of 

sports and recreations, 345-7. 
Punishments, Indian, 58-60. 

Quesnel, B. C, 392, 394, 395, 399, 
401, 445. 

Railways in British Columbia, 378- 

382. 
Rainier National Park, 338, 340. 
Raisin industry, 256. 
Ramona, home of, 117. 
Ranches, Californian, 242. 
Rasmussen, Peter, 412-4. 
Raton, New Mexico, 12. 
Redlands, California, 131, 132. 
Redondo, California, 143. 



460 



INDEX 



Remittance-man, the, 400, 401. 

Rincon route, the, 166. 

Rio Grande, the, 14, 23, no. 

Rito de los Frijoles, the, 23-25. 

River gardens, 221, 222. 

Riverside, Cahfomia, 117, 120, 125- 
133, 136; Easter pilgrimage, 129- 
131; Mission Inn at, 121, 127. 

Riviera, the Califomian, 161, 216. 

Rogue, valley of the, 321. 

Roosevelt dam, 70, 88, 91, 93, 94, 
no. 

Roseburg, Oregon, 323. 

Sacramento, 215, 224-8. 

Sacramento River, the, 215-227, 233, 
241; dikes, 226, 227; fishing in- 
dustry, 220, 221; homes along, 
223; house-boats, 224; reclama- 
tion of banks, 225-7; traffic, 222; 
truck-gardens, 221. 

Salem, Oregon, 312, 323. 

Salmon fisheries, 302, 348, 375. 

Salt River Valley, 93. 

San Antonio de Pala, mission chapel 
of, 117, 120. 

San Bernardino Range, the, 241. 

San Buenaventura, 162. 

San Carlos, Church of, Monterey, 
183. 

San Clemen te, island of, 151. 

San Diego, 97, 98, 102, 107-112, 
117, 118; advantages, 109, no; 
climate, in, 112; geography, 103; 
growth of, 108; highway, 102, 103; 
history, 107, 108; prospects, 109- 
in. 

San Francisco, 215; For tola Festi- 
val at, 201. 

San Joaquin River, the, 221, 241, 
242, 245, 256. 

San Jos6, Cahfomia, 196, 200; mis- 
sion, 195. 

San Jose, picture of, 49, 50. 

San Juan Bautista, mission of, 186. 

San Juan Islands, 343, 344. 

San Luis Obispo, Cahfomia, 172. 

San Luis Rey, mission of, 117, 119, 
120. 



San Mateo, California, 198, 199; 

New Mexico, 29. 
San Pedro, harbour of, 144, 145. 
San Salvador, the, 171. 
San Xavier del Bac, mission of, 91- 

94. 
Sand-storms in Death Valley, 176, 

177. 
Sangre de Cristo Range, the, 18, 22. 
Santa Barbara, 166-172, 202, 217; 

architecture, 170; Arlington Hotel, 

170, 171; college, 170; contrasts 

in, 167; Old Town section, 168; 

Plaza del Mar, 169; State Street, 

169, 170. 
Santa Barbara Islands, the, 146, 

151-3- 

Santa Catahna Island, 146-151, 153. 

Santa Clara Valley, the, 8, 190-210; 
air in, 206; blossom-time in, 192, 
193; climate, 200, 201; land 
values, 204, 205; productiveness 
of, 193-5; schools in, 196; ultra- 
fashionable colonies of, 198. 

Santa Clara Valley (southern), 262, 
263. 

Santa Cruz Island, 15 1-3. 

Santa Fe, 16-21, 56; govemor's pal- 
ace, 16; history, 19; Mexicans in, 
29; name of, 19; possibilities of, 
17, 18; scenery, 16. 

Santa Fe, Prescott & Phoenix Rail- 
way, 81. 

Santa F6 Trail, the, 18, 20. 

Santa Monica, Cahfornia, 143. 

Santa Paula, Cahfomia, 263, 264. 

Santa Rita Moimtains, 92. 

Santa Ynez, inn near, 180; mission 
of, 179. 

Santa Ynez Range, the, 178, 216. 

Saugus, Cahfomia, 262, 263. 

Scenic Highway, the, 21, 22. 

Schoolhouses in the Santa Clara, 196. 

Seals, of Santa Cmz, 151. 

Seaside resorts, California, 142-4. 

Seattle, 202; compared with Port- 
land, 340, 341; 346. 

Sentinel Hotel, the, 249, 250. 

Sequim Prairie, 344. 



46? 



INDEX 



Sequoia trees, the, 254, 255, 257, 258. 

Serra, Father Junipero, 108, 115, 121, 
130, 180, 181, 183, 184, iQS, 198, 
210, 246. 

Servilleta, 56. 

Sespe Valley, the, 164. 

Sheep-raising, 26-28, 262. 

Sherman, 183. 

Sierra Nevada Range, the, 160, 232, 
241, 265-7. 

Silver City, New Mexico, 32. 

Siskiyous, the, 324. 

Siwash Indians, 415, 416, 447-451. 

Skeena, the, 390, 394, 395. 

Skylanders, 42 et seq. 

Smiley Heights, Cahfornia, 131. 

Smith, Captain Jedediah, 56, 115, 
210. 

Smithsonian Institution, 40. 

Sol Due Hot Springs, 344. 

Southern California, 97. 

Spanish dominion in Mexico, over- 
throw of, 19. 

Spreckels, John D., 109. 

Stage-coaches, 90. 

Stanford, Leland, 197, 210. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 183. 

Stockton, California, 244-6. 

Stony Creek, B. C, 415, 416. 

Studebaker, John, 229. 

Suisun Bay, 220, 221. 

Summerland, Cahfornia, 167. 

Summit, California, 232, 233. 

Superstition Mountains, 93. 

Susanville, 277, 280-2. 

Sutter, John Augustus, 227, 228, 234. 

Sutter's Fort, 227, 228, 234. 

Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, 
260. 

Tacoma, 336-8, 346. 

Tahoe. (See Lake Tahoe.) 

Tahoe Tavern, 268. 

Tallac, California, 232, 

Taos, New Mexico, 22, S5~S8; 

houses, 45, 57. 
Tehachapi Range, the, 97, 241, 261. 
Telegraph stations, frontier, 403, 

404. 



Tennis Club, Oj'ai Valley, 164. 
Tent City, at Coronado, 112, 113. 
Tfete Jaune Pass, the, 379, 380. 
The Dalles, Oregon, 276, 277, 286-8, 

291. 
Tiles, Spanish, 168, 
Tillamook County, Oregon, 326, 327. 
Tingley, Madame, 103. 
Torrey pine, the, 118. 
Trail riding, 260. 
Trees, California Big, 254, 255, 257, 

258. 
Trevet, Victor, 293. 
Truck-gardens, 221, 222. 
Truckee, Cahfornia, 233-5, 268, 269. 
Tucson, Arizona, 80, 81, 92, 94. 
Tucson Farms, no. 
Tuna Club, the, at Avalon, 150, 151. 
Tuna fishing, 149-151. 
Turquoise deposits, 32. 
Tyler, President, 296. 

Union Pacific Railroad, 21. 
Universal Brotherhood, the, 103. 
University of Cahfornia, Greek 

Theatre at, 202. 
University of New Mexico, the, 15. 

Vallejo, Cahfornia, 219, 220. 
Vancouver, B. C, 116, 349, 350, 

363-7, 369- 

Vancouver Island, 345, 370-6, 442; 
fish and game, 375; Island High- 
way, 371-4; motoring on, 372; 
railway, 381; scenery, 373, 374. 

van Dyke, Dr. Henry, 130. 

Vargas, De, 19. 

Venice, Cahfornia, 143, 144. 

Ventura, Cahfornia, 162. 

Victoria, B. C, 346, 363-370; Har- 
bour, 367, 368. 

Visalia, Cahfornia, 246, 257, 258. 

Vittoria, the, 171. 

Vizcaino, 181. 

Wagon- trains, 20, 21, 398. 
Wah, the brothers, 7, 8. 
Walla Walla, 295. 
Wallace, General Lew, 16. 



462 



INDEX 



Washington, 331 et seq.; character of 
the country, 334, 335; climate, 
335; land clearing, 334, 335; 
names of towns, 333; roads, 331, 
332; sign-posts, 333, 334; water- 
power, 335. 

Water discovery in the Mimbres 
Valley, 5, 6. 

Waterfalls of the Columbia River, 
300, 301. 

Wawona, California, 254. 

Webster, secretary of state, 296. 

Well-digging in New Mexico, 11. 

White Rock Canon, 23. 



Whitman, 295, 296. 

Willamette River, the, 309-311, 317. 

Wood, Mr., 150. 

Wool industry, the, 26-28. 



Yavapai Club, the, 81. 

Yosemite VaUey, the, 246-260; In- 
dian settlement, 250-2; Sentinel 
Hotel, 249, 250; variety of recrea- 
tion, 253. 

Yukon Telegraph Trail, 395. 

Yuma, Arizona, 83-85, 97, 98, 102, 
no. 



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